The Action Catalyst
Education is Freedom, with James Keyes (Learning, Business, Leadership, Change)
Tue, 15 Oct 2024
James Keyes’ career has included serving as CEO of two Fortune 500 companies; Blockbuster Inc. and 7-Eleven, but he starting off working to be an astronaut. Hear how, plus find out what Einstein called “intelligence having fun”, learn about what CEO really stands for, why 7-Eleven and Blockbuster were really part of the same business, what REALLY happened to Blockbuster (and why you may not have seen the last of it), the root of all commerce, the best way to prioritize your time, dealing with change and fear, and the key to true freedom, and how James narrowly avoided the mafia…we think.Mentioned in this episode:Learn more at SouthwesternConsulting.com/Coaching/StudentsSouthwestern Student Coaching
I set this thing off, almost blew myself up. Didn't manage to get off the ground, but it did create quite a little fire. So I snuffed out the fire and then left. Came back and discovered I had nearly burned down half the neighborhood. So here's a kid trying to learn. And I was dubbed a bad kid in the neighborhood because I almost burned the place down.
The town survived. No one died. Exactly. Exactly.
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Today's guest is James Keyes, a longtime business leader currently serving as the chairman of Key Development LLC. His career has included serving as CEO of two Fortune 500 companies, Blockbuster Incorporated and 7-Eleven, His new book, Education is Freedom, The Future is in Your Hands, highlights his passion for lifelong learning and is out now. James, thanks for joining us. Sure, yeah.
You better call me Jim, though, Adam. I put James on the book because I wanted to be more formal, but nobody will know who it is if they call me James.
Oh no. Okay. It's a nice part about Adam. At least nobody calls you like ad. Yeah. You can't reduce it any further. Yeah. You know, I'm always curious what someone thought was going to be their life path in their early days. And then what some of the twists and turns were that caused it to be quite different than maybe what they expected.
So what path were you thinking you were on and then what changed? Yeah.
That's a really good question. I literally grew up in circumstances where I didn't even know what options were out there. Business to me was the factory my dad worked at, and I didn't want any part of that. So business was kind of dark and dirty and hard. Or the alternative was it was typing class. I remember in high school, we had typing class, no frame of reference whatsoever.
But I was inspired by the space program at the time. As a kid, I grew up watching the Apollo missions and Buzz Aldrin walk on the moon and Charlie Duke and guys like that. And so I thought, okay, these guys came from nothing and they've become astronauts. So maybe that's a path for me. I want to be an astronaut and I can do really cool things. So that was my first dream to be an astronaut.
Set out to do that. Fell a little bit short of the astronaut thing, at least so far in my life. You never know though. Yeah. What did that even look like? Well, Adam, that would imply I even knew the path to be an astronaut. All I knew is that to be an astronaut, I'd better be smart.
And so literally I said, well, if you really want to be an astronaut, you better study because they have to be smart. I dove into learning and I dove into school and I loved science. You know, I was trying to learn as much as I could. One of my failures, I said, I'm going to learn how to be a rocket scientist and that will be my path to being an astronaut.
And a guy named Robert Goddard, like the father of modern rocketry, grew up in this town not too far from where I grew up. So I was kind of inspired by him. And I said, I'm going to work on my own rocket. So I took an old flashlight and I put some fins on it and a nose cone on it. I had the body of the flashlight and I took a baggie and I put gas in it.
I thought, well, if I put gas in it and if I control the flow of gas, I maybe make it fly. Pretty silly. I was like seven years old or eight years old, something like that. So, I set this thing off, almost blew myself up, didn't manage to get off the ground but it did create quite a little fire.
So, I snuffed out the fire and then left, came back and discovered I had nearly burned down half the neighborhood. Fire took off. So, here's a kid trying to learn, trying to be a rocket scientist and I was dubbed a bad kid in the neighborhood because I almost burned the place down.
But, you know, it's a good early lesson that failure is going to be a part of the journey. But it's a part of the journey. I have a quote from Nelson Mandela that I use all the time. I never lose. I win or I learn. Yeah, the town survived. No one died in that explosion. Exactly. And I learned I was not cut out to be a rocket scientist.
Maybe not, but you found a way to reconnect with some of that passion, right? 40 years as a pilot.
I am a commercially rated pilot. I don't fly commercial airlines. I fly a Citation, which is I'm at 40 to 45,000 feet above most of the commercial airlines. Wow. Without a need for a co-pilot.
That's pretty cool. Yeah, it's beyond cool. You know, you've had such a story career between your time as a CEO, you know, at 7-Eleven, Blockbuster, and we'll get into a lot of that. But I thought something that really drew me was actually all of your, I think it almost goes beyond to say hobbies, but I mean, you composed and co-wrote a song that was...
So composing, flying, sculpting, painting, to me that's reflective of someone who is innately curious.
Yeah, it's curiosity. Creativity, interestingly. Einstein called creativity intelligence having fun. Yeah. And it's so true. I mean, think about it. Playing music is actually a form of mathematics. People don't think about it that way, but if you look at a score, it is mathematically correct in terms of beats and notes and structure and the way it comes together.
It's almost a subliminal use of mathematics when you learn how to play an instrument, but it's also fun. And so it's kind of, it makes learning fun. And curiosity is that innate. that we all have as children. I mean, how many kids do you know that don't run around asking why? And they're just curious about everything because their minds are just developing and they just can't get enough.
Want to learn more and more and more. And if we can learn as adults also to keep asking why, there's just so much more richness that we can enjoy. Why just look at art? Why not practice it? And then the next time you go to a museum after you had a canvas and played around with some paint and mixing colors, the next time you go to a museum, you look at a great masterpiece.
It's so much more meaningful when you've actually done it yourself.
On the business side of things, taking on the role of president and CEO of a tremendously large organization, I can only imagine comes with a certain amount of stress and pressure. What were some of the things that you felt were most preparational in taking on this role? What were some of the key things or events that you felt equipped you to lead so many people?
Well, I'll share a story with you. I use this story sparingly because honestly, it sounds a little flaky. Shortly after being named CEO, I ended up with a dream. Now you see why I don't tell the story very often. But it was an incredibly powerful dream.
And I was probably having that natural hesitation that we all have, maybe a little imposter syndrome, whatever it is that says, oh my gosh, I'm the dog that caught the car. Now I... Worked my whole career to try to be a CEO. Now I am one. Am I able to do this? Am I capable of doing this? And in this dream, I was told I was going to get a gift.
And I was given tasks and I was sent off to do these tasks. And I came back from every task. Then I woke up. Darn it. I woke up too early. I didn't get my gift. And I write down three words, change, confidence, and clarity. I said, what the heck does that mean? The next morning I'm thinking about it and this, I didn't get my gift. And then I started talking about it.
Virtually everybody that I shared that story with said, that is your gift. How do you think you got there? You were able to take the worst kinds of change from the time you were a little kid and turn that into a positive. So you've recognized that change equals opportunity. That is the very acronym CEO. Change equals opportunity. That's the role of a CEO.
And you're the best person we know at being able to deal with change, good or bad. And you've got this weird sense of confidence that you can do anything. I realize now that all it is is a matter of learning. I don't learn to do anything.
And then they said the third thing is you've got this weird sense of clarity that you break complex things into really simple terms that you can then communicate it out Clearly, change, confidence, and clarity, that was the gift of those three things that I didn't even know I had, I think anyone can use to find their own personal or professional success.
No, that's fabulous. Yeah, I love that. You came into Blockbuster during a tough time. I wanted to know, and maybe Blockbuster is the right place to ask this question, but you hit a wall.
Well, I've hit a lot of walls in my career. People forget that 7-Eleven was bankrupt back in 1991, shortly after I joined the company. And I thought, Man, what a bad career decision. I went from a major oil company to 7-Eleven thinking that it was going to be a great career trajectory, and I find them now bankrupt. This is one of those things that change equals opportunity.
The company had 10 years of same-store sales declines, was really on a difficult trajectory. It was growing still, but it was having trouble keeping up with competitors, and it ultimately had to file for bankruptcy. But That gave it the opportunity to reinvent itself.
We were able to look at the success of our licensed operations around the world, places like Japan, Taiwan, Thailand, bring those learnings back to the United States. So we were able to reinvent the company and come out of bankruptcy as a successful entity. For me personally, it ended up being a great opportunity because I thought I was going to lose my job like everybody else.
But we came out of bankruptcy and I ended up with a promotion and was put in charge of strategic planning for the new enterprise, led to then a career trajectory that gave me an opportunity ultimately to be CEO of 7-Eleven.
So we took adversity, crisis, and then turned it into the next 10 years, 15 years of significant success, which when we sold the company in the year 2005, gave me the opportunity then to take on the challenge of Blockbuster. So I went into Blockbuster, eyes wide open. I knew it was going to be a challenge. Didn't know the kind of challenge we would face. Yeah.
Because no one thinks about Blockbuster and 7-Eleven as the same thing, except they're two iconic brands, right? If you think about the nature of Blockbuster's business, it wasn't renting DVDs. That wasn't their business. Their business was convenient access to media entertainment. It's a convenience business, not unlike 7-Eleven. They made the pivot
from VHS tapes, which is where the industry started, to DVDs. DVDs were more convenient access to media entertainment. So they made that pivot successfully. The digital transition was coming. Clearly it was coming. I wanted to take the company there. My very first act as CEO was to buy a streaming video company called Blockbuster On Demand.
So we had a massive competitive advantage versus Netflix because Netflix had DVDs by mail, very little else. They'd It had streaming, but they had very old movies. MovieLink had new releases, which was 80% of the Blockbuster business. So we had a much better offering, arguably, a streaming platform, DVDs by mail, stores. In case you didn't want the one you got by mail, you could exchange it.
We had kiosks. So we had something called total access, which is any way you want your media entertainment, we have it for you. Pretty compelling competitive advantage, right? So you say, what happened? Well, we also had a billion dollars of debt.
That occurred from an IPO, in other words, a public offering that Viacom once owned Blockbuster, and they spun it out and created a new entity, a public company called Blockbuster. In 2004, put on a billion dollars of debt. Third of which was due in 2009. Now, if you remember what happened in 2008, something called Lehman Brothers occurred.
Financial market collapsed around Lehman Brothers failure and others. And we had a refinancing that we had to get done. Yeah. It's like being in a commercial airliner at 40,000 feet and all of a sudden the air gets sucked out. You have a decompression. That's what happened to Blockbuster.
We had to put the aircraft in a bit of a dive, if you will, preserve cash and get to a safe altitude to be able to then climb back up. So we took it through a restructuring and had a successful sale of the entity to Dish Networks. So in spite of popular belief, Blockbuster didn't liquidate. They didn't go away.
They were sold to Dish Network, who ultimately had a different strategy or 100% streaming and 100% streaming via mobility. They were a bit early in their strategy and ultimately closed the stores down. They still own the brand. You never know. It may come back one day.
Yeah. Wow. So this is something I've thought about over the last just few days thinking about this interview was a reluctance of leaders to be honest with their CEO. But I'm kind of curious how you dealt with maybe some of those challenges or how you generated a culture in the leadership teams that you formed where you got reality.
There's an expression for that, a technical expression. I'll give you the technical business term. Yes. It's called a grin fucker. Yes, sir. Yes, sir. That's a good idea, sir. That. But it's true. It occurs and it's just so frustrating. Look, the root cause of that is fear. People are afraid they're going to lose their job. Fear is the biggest killer. of careers, of companies, even societies.
They're coming to get you. They're going to take something from you. They got something that you don't have. Isn't that unfair? Fear is the lowest common denominator. It works. It's a motivating tool. There's only two ways to motivate people. You motivate them through hope and through inspiration. Or you scare them. So take that same reaction now. Put yourself in a corporate environment.
Somebody does something that you think, I may lose my job. I may fail. Or I don't think that's a good idea, but I don't want to tell him. It's either fight and be disruptive in the work environment. We've all seen it. Somebody being obnoxious in a boardroom and demonstrating non-productive behavior, just being argumentative for no reason. Or It's the corporate version of flight, which is inertia.
I do nothing. Yes. Both are bad. Both can be cured, but only through knowledge. Because what happens when you're afraid? If you're afraid of the dark and you turn on the light, you realize, oh, that's silly. I didn't have anything to be afraid of. Well, knowledge is light. Communications is a way to spread the light. So in a time of crisis...
communications from the leadership are critically important because that's the light that takes away fear throughout the organization.
Sure. Jim, was there anything you did in particular with your leaders to make them feel they could approach you about challenges?
Change, confidence, clarity. Well, the clarity of Communications is both inbound and outbound. So listening is critically, critically important. As humans, we are often guilty of trying to formulate our response before fully understanding what someone's trying to tell us, trying to hear and truly understand what that person's trying to tell me.
And then trying to be very clear in my communications also so that I'm not triggering that fear response. Because once I trigger that, once I've made them afraid, I've lost, I won't get truth.
Yeah.
What I'm trying to communicate in my book is that leadership is about change, constant change. inevitable, lifelong change. It's constantly changing as a leader, being able to adapt to different circumstances, different times, different styles, because you have different people with different reactions. And that constant adaptation to change as a leader, I think is what's critically important.
Leadership's about change and evolution. It changes the root of all commerce. Do you think about it? Someone needed something and someone satisfied that need and got paid for that service. Commerce begins, right? It does. It's the heart of all commerce. And then that person got a little bit complacent and somebody else said, hey, I'm going to change things and give you another way to satisfy.
And then change occurs, right? Again, and someone profits from it and someone else perhaps doesn't. And so change is at the heart of all commerce. And yet... When change occurs, as humans, we naturally resist. We get worried because it creates that fear thing. There's only two responses to change.
You can either respond favorably and see it as opportunity, or you can start blaming, feeling sorry for yourself, put your head down. So it's not the change that matters. Change is good. Change good or bad change and be positive. It's response to change that separates winners from losers.
You know, I think one other tactical thing I wanted to ask before we do like kind of a quick lightning round of questions. I thought this was a lightning round. The question I had was about time, where to invest it when there's so many areas, places, people asking for it. Anything that you'd share on that that's been a good process or system for you about how you funnel your time and leadership?
It's for me all about where am I going to either learn the most or contribute the most? One of those two things. So somebody comes to me with a board seat and maybe a company I know nothing about or an industry I know nothing about, but if it's an opportunity to really learn a lot,
because there are really good people on that board and it's a dynamic company that I'm going to learn from, learn a whole new industry, I may go do it. And that's my criteria. Am I going to learn from it or is it something, man, I can really help these folks get to the next level.
And I'd like to use my many, many years of experience to help them because I believe they're on the right track, but I can really contribute to this entity. And then this is probably a fun factor too. Is this going to be fun?
Yeah, that's fair. And looking at all the hobbies that you've developed, do you feel that to some degree having some of these things that are more artistic or creative in nature were supportive of your business?
Absolutely. I am always amazed at how people try to specialize so early in their career. We've got kids now trying to be an engineer when they're in the sixth grade. It's great that somebody thinks they know what they want to do. I have no idea. Maybe I'm the exception, but I don't think most of us are mature enough even throughout high school to truly know what things will excite us.
the rest of our life. So, I encourage more breadth of knowledge and understanding and I've become a bit of a junkie about the more I learn, the more I can do. So, I'm just passionate about learning more stuff because I find it's interesting.
I can go anywhere in the world now and mix in different cultures very comfortably because I've learned about those cultures and I've learned about the people from those cultures. It makes it far more interesting to travel when you know what you're dealing with. It's not just taking pictures of recognizable buildings and monuments and things.
It's really, really mixing with people and getting to know them. And when you're doing that, if you can talk about... Flying airplanes, that's one of their passions. Or music, it just makes it even a richer experience. And I think anyone can do that.
It takes that curiosity. I love it. So just for some quick responses to a few of these questions, we looked at what you just said, culture, places. Just right now, what's the culture, country that you're most fascinated in and want to travel to? Yeah.
If you were to say where would you go if you had a preference, I'd say, well, tell me what you're going to let me do. If I'm going for food, I'd probably go to France. Because the restaurants are fabulous. If I'm going for relaxation and killer beaches, I'd probably go to Thailand. I love the Thai culture and I love the beaches there and the food and the people are so sweet.
If I wanted to just have fun, I'd probably go rent a car and blast around the streets of the southern coast of France, the Amalfi Coast in Italy. If I want to go to a show and see theater, I'd probably go to London. There's so much richness out there. Anyway, this is the lightning round. I got to stop.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's pretty good. Because you've composed, I just wanted to ask you this question. What are you listening to right now?
I listen to everything. And this is the problem. She talked about time. There's not enough time in my life to listen to everything I want to listen to. Last evening, I was former chairman of the Dallas Symphony. Last evening, I listened to Mozart, cello and violin. Today, I'm going to speak at a school and I'll be introduced to Snoop Dogg's Drop It While It's Hot. That's a bit of a range there.
Yeah. Piece of advice that you're really glad that you ignored. So thinking back at your whole business career, was there a time where someone tried to give you some advice and you willfully ignored it to a better benefit?
Yeah. Two things. I was working at McDonald's and I had two interesting career opportunities. One was a guy, I don't know who he was, but he was this kind of thuggy looking guy. And he used to call me Jimmy. Jimmy, got a deal for you. Come to work for the boss. Come work for the man. We'll take care of you, Jimmy. Be an interesting life. And this is up in the Northeast. And
I kind of knew what he wanted me to do. And he's like, hey, Jimmy, you're going to make a lot of money, Jimmy. I'm really glad I didn't get on that path. I was right out of The Sopranos. You know, I could have been in one of those bad movies. So that was one. Thank you. But no, I don't think I don't think I need to meet the boss at the same time.
At the same time, I was offered an opportunity to go to Hamburger U. So here's two alternatives. Hamburger U and become a store manager within the McDonald's system. McDonald's was just growing at the time. I don't know what the job was, but turning both of those down and instead getting a degree in...
gave me far more options than I would have ever had at Hamburger U. While my life may not be as colorful as it would have been working for whoever that was, I think it was a good decision. Absolutely.
In a lot of conversations with a variety of people who've had a variety of different successes in their career, there's something that I always want to help our listeners define for who we're interviewing. That's what success actually means to you and how you know when you've achieved it.
It's very simply one word, freedom. Okay. It's why the book is called Education is Freedom. It's all about freedom. People think it's about money. Money is just a tool to give you freedom. But even without money, knowledge is what gives you freedom. You can have the freedom to... Have you ever seen that show, Billion Dollar Undercover Billionaire? Yeah. Yeah.
They drop these people on the street with like 100 bucks and see if they can become rich again. Interestingly, it's really not about money. Everybody thinks, oh, that's about making money. No. These people have the knowledge... Yes. ...to then go out and give themselves a lifestyle that gives them freedom. Yeah.
And... Coming back to this, which is your book, oftentimes when you're offering a book, some of the advice people tend to give you is don't write it for everyone. Write it with someone in mind. Who are you writing for?
I wrote the book for the 18 to 20-year-old me that was a kid that had no idea that he could afford to do anything. beyond the immediate community and experience of family members who didn't have the opportunity to go to college or live the lifestyle that I lived. And so, I wrote it kind of for me.
It was like what I would have told my 18 to 20-year-old self that, hey, tremendous opportunity and the secret to your success is in books. And by the way, I'm going to give you a roadmap to even make it simpler because here's a pathway, what to learn, how to learn, or why to learn. If you do these things, you will be successful. So that was my target.
Now, what I've found though, Adam, I'm shocked at the demographic threat. Because while I targeted that audience, the biggest response has been from 25 to 40 that are early in their career saying, I need to get to that next level. How do I do it? And they're finding that same roadmap applies to them.
Even older people can see that lifelong learning really can make their life richer, even if they're retired.
This probably syncs right up for someone when they read the book. But the last question I'd ask would be, if you could summarize the advice you would give that 21-year-old version of yourself, knowing everything you know now, what would that be? Yeah, to use knowledge to eliminate fear. Wow. Yeah, that's really nice.
That's a good, concise way to say it. It's what it's all about because fear is such a killer of individuals, of careers, of corporations, of society. And the antidote to fear truly is knowledge.
Jim, thanks for sharing some of this knowledge with us. For folks who want to kind of follow your journey and continued exploration of things, and then also your book, where can they go to learn more about you?
Well, I've got a website, James. I use James for the website. It's very formal. You can tell I'm a really formal guy. So jameswkeys.com and that's my website. And then at jkeys, first initial, last name at jkeys author. I'm on TikTok and Instagram and Facebook and all those and Twitter, all those locations. And I'm trying to put out content that
We'll take little pieces of the book and hopefully help to change some lives. That's my goal in life now is to help everybody realize their full potential because it's really not hard. If I can do it, seriously, anybody can use these same things to eliminate fear and to unlock opportunity.
Wonderful. Yeah, I really appreciate the words of wisdom and thanks for sharing with our audience today. Happy to join you. This has been fun.
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This is your host, Adam Outland. And outside of this podcast, I'm also the leader for a division of our company, Southwestern Consulting, and our division is the Southwestern Student Coaching Program. And that division, we started back in 2020 because the desire we had was to take all these skills that we've equipped executives with for
Over a decade, I've coached executives and managers and sales professionals on the skills, the habits, the motivation, and the systems to be successful in their job and in life.
And what we realized from working with 30, 40, 50 year olds was if we could have gotten to them when they were in ninth grade, in middle school, in high school, and equipped them with the same things we're teaching them now, the ripple effects would be huge.
And so back in 2020, we decided to formulate a coaching program for youth, equipping youth with the same types of skill development that we typically work on with adults. We just apply it to their world.
And what that looks like is teaching them the study skills, the communication skills that they can use every day in the classroom and outside the classroom, coaching them on the mindset and the motivation of someone who's a top performer. And what does that mean? It means helping a young teenager create and craft a vision for themselves. Because without a vision, we perish.
But with a vision, we can be equipped with the motivation to dig into our study habits. We can see the connection between our future and the excellence that we have to form in our habits now to be successful in the long run. And we also work on the emotional intelligence.
It's how we balance our emotions and manage those emotions when they come up in a way that allows us to communicate effectively with others and to communicate with ourselves. It's about equipping young people with self-talk. That means equipping them with the language that they can use to better direct their thoughts and their mind to accomplish their goals and their aims.
And lastly, we equip them with the systems. That means for us, the tools, the time management and the organization strategies to not just work hard in life, but to work smart. And when we combine all these different areas that we work with our teens on, what we find is that they form the habits early in life that allows them to achieve their goals later in life and even right now.
And so our passion is to equip as many young people across this world as we can. And we're doing pretty good so far. We've got teens in seven different countries who have been through our coaching program to date. We've worked with over 400 teens, and we would love to be able to serve you as well. Here's how it works. If you want to investigate coaching, we start with a parent consultation.
That's a free call to discuss your students' particular needs and our program details. We work with Olympic athletes all the way down to teens that are just struggling to motivate themselves to do the daily work necessary in their class. So wherever your teen is, we'll meet them where they are and get them to the next level. And that starts with a parent consultation with you.
A student planning session, that's the next step. If we agree that the value that coaching can bring matches your team, then we will move to a student planning session. It's basically a free one-on-one coaching session with your team. And that is designed to support them, but it's also designed to ask a lot of questions to help explore whether or not they want to be coached.
Because at the end of the day, they ultimately have to be the one that pulls the trigger. And then after your student planning session, we get them paired with the right coach for them. We have an amazing staff of coaches from ex-division one athletes, people who've come from the Ivy League system.
We have coaches who have come from entrepreneurial backgrounds and acting backgrounds, so we can pair them with the right fit for them. And then once they partner with their coach, they'll benefit from two coaching sessions a month to really zone in on their personal growth and their skill development.
So if you're ready to give your student the tools they need to be successful, click the link in the show notes, for more information, and to make sure you can schedule your free parent consultation today.