The Action Catalyst
Passion Struck, with John Miles (Leadership, Self Improvement, Business, Mindset)
Tue, 20 Aug 2024
Author, entrepreneur, Fortune 50 senior executive, and award-winning podcast host John Miles recalls ALMOST becoming an FBI agent, shares a cautionary tale from Microsoft and a story about the man who humbled Jimmy Carter, and explains why there’s no such thing as a practice mentality, the perfect recipe for greatness, the dehumanization of work, being a “gardener leader”, social impact theory, and how to NOT live like a pinball.Mentioned in this episode:Learn more at SouthwesternConsulting.com/Coaching/StudentsSouthwestern Student Coaching
constant learning being curious about how to do things differently but also deliberate action and when you combine those things meaning you're choosing growth time and time again whether it's in your personal life or in a business setting and then you're constantly taking actions that go in concert with that growth you're creating it's a perfect recipe for greatness.
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Today's guest is John Miles, a former naval officer, an author, entrepreneur, Fortune 50 senior executive, and award-winning podcast host who has established himself as an expert in behavioral change and leadership.
His book, Passion Struck, along with the podcast and radio show of the same name, have earned praise from many, including some past Action Catalyst guests, such as Matt Higgins, Mark Devine, and Marshall Goldsmith. So John, good to meet you. You too, Adam.
You know, one of the things that I do like talking to our guests about, and I kind of probably wanted to open with you some, is focusing a lot on the journey. You know, most of our guests didn't necessarily have a master plan from the age of 10 on being where they are today. It's evolved over time.
What was the evolution that you went through, different iterations that you were considering doing along the way?
Thanks for that question. As I was growing up, I had always had in my mind that I was going to be doing something of impact to others, but I always thought it was going to be in a way of some type of public service, whether that was being a police officer, an FBI agent, fireman. I never really saw myself sitting behind a desk of sorts.
I kind of saw myself being out there and living this life of exhilaration, et cetera. And for me, that's exactly how my life was going up until about the age 28. I had gone to the Naval Academy, had spent time as a military officer where I was working at the counter-drug mecca for the United States.
And in this command, we had all these different law enforcement entities and intelligence entities, and they all asked me to apply. And here I am making this choice of, do I want to go to the DEA, NSA, FBI, et cetera? And I ended up taking the route of becoming an FBI agent.
And it was literally a few days from going to Quantico when my detailer called me out of the blue and said, I've got some unfortunate news for you. Congress can't get their act together. You use stronger words than that. And your class has unfortunately been recycled. And to my nativity, I thought,
He was telling me I had a couple month delay and it ended up being closer to a four year, three and a half to four year delay. And by the time that the opportunity represented itself, I had been forced to take a plan B when this plan A vanished in front of me and that plan B.
B ended up becoming then the next 20 to 25 years of my career, a career that I never thought I was going to get into and was kind of forced to go into because of circumstances beyond my control.
And in reflection, did you feel like that path was the right one?
Well, I think when we get immersed in it, we don't really think that way. I guess I always had this mentality, regardless of what I did, I always aspired to do the best job that I possibly could. So before long, I had really excelled at what I was doing and was on this rocket ship climb to the top, so to speak.
I think each phase of our life, we pull and extract different lessons that we end up being able to leverage later on. And I could assume some of the lessons that you might have learned at the Naval Academy where I think you were also an athlete as well.
Yeah, well, it's funny. I think almost everyone who goes to the Naval Academy is an athlete. Yeah, I was highly recruited to be a cross-country and track runner, and that's where I got my start.
Yeah. What are some of the lessons you pulled from that earlier formative experience that you were able to leverage in your professional and consulting career?
I would like to even go a little bit before I went to the Naval Academy. Please. When I was coming out of middle school, going into high school, I had always been kind of this chubby kid. And my salvation from that was I had always been a hard worker. My family kind of gave us the basics and anything beyond that. We were kind of called upon to find our own way.
And so when I was in fifth or sixth grade, I actually started a paper route. And having to do that paper route every day and get that exercise in kind of reshaped my trajectory. But I still wasn't where I wanted to be going into high school. And so I thought, I'll try this cross-country thing, never expecting to be any good at it. When I first started, the seniors on the team had...
no dedication or wherewithal to make us a top performing team. And yet there was this group of sophomores and juniors on the team who were really serious about what they were doing. And I started to watch them and wanted to be like them. And the more I started to enter their circle, which was difficult because they were faster than me.
So it meant that if I were going to go out on a training run with them, it was really difficult trying to keep up. I stuck with it. And the more I stuck with it, the more I started learning that not only were they working out there, but they were also doing things outside of practice, such as trying to get good sleep, trying to eat well, and were really so supportive of each other.
So they were trying to make Hmm. I had a huge issue at first where I was psyching myself out so much before races to the point that I would get physically sick. And I started to approach practice as if it was a race. And it completely changed. The way I've lived my life up until this day, because if you start treating every day as if it's a game day, you don't have that anxiety anymore.
So those things were kind of a foundation that when I went to the Naval Academy, I was so glad I had.
So you're out of the Naval Academy and take this kind of windy road that gets you to consulting and then from consulting into senior executive roles with fairly large companies.
Well, I started out at Booz Allen and then Anderson Consulting. So I got to work in a lot of large companies, ExxonMobil, Halliburton, companies of that size. But I was also, by the time I got to Anderson, I started practice focused on high growth mid-market companies. So I was also working on WebMD in the very early days and other startups like that mid-sized companies.
So I was lucky enough that I had experience doing both. I started a company called Lendlease, headquartered out of Australia. And when I started with them, they had about a $15 billion revenue. They were part financial institution. They own the second largest bank in Australia. They had a whole portfolio of mutual funds.
They also had a real estate investment trust area that fueled the other side of their business, which was property management and construction. And then from there, I went to Lowe's, where I initially was brought in to fix what had preceded me as the largest hacking incident in retail history.
and went on from that to lead all application development and then eventually all big data and integration for them. And then that led me to becoming a CIO at Dell.
Yeah. One of the things that you write about is the need for curiosity. There's some points that you make about both the need for curiosity and the bias to action. So where did this evolve for you on a personal level? And then how have you explored this over the course of your career?
So I'll take us all back to 2011. I was in the process of leaving Dell because so much of our business model was wed to Microsoft. I had met Steve Ballmer a number of times, who's the former CEO of Microsoft. And When Steve heard I was leaving, he asked me to come to Microsoft to become the CIO. And as any of these things are, it's not as easy a process as Steve says.
He wants you in this position, and it just happens. So for me, this amounted into something like 16 to 20 interviews that I had to go through. And what I found was that Microsoft at that time had a very fixed mindset. And they really couldn't see how to do things a different way.
And on top of that, Balmer had this leadership style where he used his size, he's a large man, his large voice and his intimidation to get things done. So that's how the rank and file were treating many of the employees underneath them was really an era of intimidation to get things done. And I met this man who had been there for...
a long time at that point who was talking to me about things that were so different and foreign about what Microsoft could be if they would start doing things differently. And that was Satya Nadella. And this was three and a half years before he took over the role that he has now.
The reason I'm bringing this all up is I didn't end up taking that position because I thought I was walking into a toxic culture at the time, which it would have been. But if you look at what he has brought into that company, He has really brought in a culture of growth, of constant learning, where he really rewards people for being curious about how to do things differently.
But there's also a culture of deliberate action. And when you combine those things, meaning you're choosing growth time and time again, whether it's in your personal life or in a business setting, And then you're constantly taking actions that go in concert with that growth you're trying to creating. It's a perfect recipe for greatness.
We think that in order to achieve these monumental things in life. It comes down to these grandiose moments. And what I have learned from talking to 50-plus behavior scientists and reading hundreds of books is that's not how things work. We as humans are the ultimate learning machine.
And coupling that with intentional actions that get either you or the organization that you're working for closer to the long-term aspirations and the shorter-term ambitions that you're trying to accomplish.
it's hard to maintain a bias for action culturally in companies at scale, right? Is there anything that you could share where companies have worked around that to create a better platform for allowing bias for action?
So I think one of the leading causes of disengagement and people feeling unfulfilled in work is we're dehumanizing work, meaning it is so much about the spreadsheets and top line and bottom line growth that we're taking out the human and we're trying to maximize profits by micromanaging or robotizing or institutionalizing the work that people do.
What that approach is doing is it is helping with top and bottom line growth, in the short term, but it also weeds out creativity and innovation because people are so conditioned to doing the tasks that they're not really given the white space to have breaks to be creative, to think differently, etc.
And so one of the things I am really calling for is that we need a change in the way we're leading people. And so you can think of a gardener leader approach is being very much the metaphor of a gardener. And just as a gardener needs to be there to plant the seeds and give nourishment, them sitting over the plants day in and night isn't going to make plants grow any better.
And so they really need to have this philosophy of being eyes on, but hands off. And I first heard about this concept from General Stan McChrystal. And as Stan was talking to me about it, we were discussing his role when he was in charge of all forces in Afghanistan. And there was no way that him in a situation room or the president back in D.C. could understand this.
what a Green Beret team was doing in a mountainside in Afghanistan and tried to micromanage their everyone movement. So what he could do is he could make sure that those people who were fighting understood the mission. He could give them the best training that he possibly could. He could give them the best leadership he could.
But when it came to them executing their mission, he had to be hands off and trust that the tools learning experiences, leadership that they had been given, they would make their appropriate decisions in the fight.
And the way we can look at that in the business world today is we can do the same thing, whether it's a project manager leading a team or a software developer who might be an individual contributor. You could give them what the destination is you're trying to achieve and let them be creative in taking a completely different approach to getting there.
But if you do this in an agile way, they're checkpoints. So if they're off course, you can quickly get them back on. And it really humanizes the individuals in the process.
Do you feel that's a universal?
Like anything, it's a both and situation. You're going to have individuals who require more oversight and more handholding than others. And you're going to have your breakthrough performers typically who require a lot less of that handholding because they're free thinking and innovating and
inventing new ways of doing things so to me typically what i have found is those employees end up winding up on a chart as either c performers b performers or a performers sure and i find more of the a performers are able to operate more autonomously where more of your c or b what we used to call as plotters tend to need more structure in the way that they're doing things
The other problem I see, we tend to see a person in their current role not understanding and really taking the time to understand their backstory. And a great example of this is I remember I had this really talented woman who worked for me at Lowe's, and I saw her and her current position of being a director underneath me at the time.
But what I didn't understand, she had prior to that been a CIO at a smaller company. She had a lot of data experience. Not only that, she had started her career in the business side before transitioning into the IT side and really had this wealth of knowledge. And I think we don't spend enough time getting to understand who the individual is. Yeah, absolutely.
That just is they have career aspirations. They also have life aspirations. And so if you would know that that developer who's working for you is trying to save money to buy a house for his family and they're expecting a child and you somehow bring that into how you're leading them and being more understanding of that and acknowledging it.
A hundred times out of a hundred, you're going to get better performance out of the person because they see you treating them as a human and interested in them both at work and in their larger success in life.
Yeah, I think that's really well said. You know, I think almost every successful person that we've had on this podcast has pulled some of their lessons, not from success, but actually from failure and shortcoming. A lot of our listeners, it's really easy to just superimpose on you that, okay, John was always this amazing guy. He did everything right. And life was just this perfect uphill chart.
What were some of the bumps in your road and where did some of these lessons come in that you learned not from succeeding but from falling short?
One of my favorite questions that I've always gotten in an interview is tell me about your strengths and your biggest weakness. And to me, when someone answers that question saying they don't have weaknesses or trying to lessen them, I always know that they're not a good fit because they're not being authentic with their answers.
Been thinking a lot recently about Jimmy Carter, given he's kind of at the ending stages of his amazing life. He's a Naval Academy grad, and I remembered this story. He was interviewing to become part of the Spurgeon Nuclear Power Program in the Navy, and this is back in the early 1950s. And during this time, you had Hyman Rickover, the longest standing military officer of all time.
He ended up being a military officer until his 80s. He was known and feared for how demanding he was in interviews. People would lose their minds trying to think about how to prepare themselves for these interviews. In this case, Jimmy Carter had already graduated from the Naval Academy. He was in the fleet already, and he applied.
And he has this interview with the admiral, and the admiral is talking to him for about two hours. And he doesn't really do this in a set interview style. He asks questions. Carter to start talking to him about areas of interest and areas that he knows best.
And as Carter is going through everything from navigation to propulsion systems to stoicism and everything else, he realizes that Rickover is a master in every single one of these topics and an expert in them, and that he is basically being put to task. And so as they're ending the interview, Rickover asks him one final question.
And he said, while you were at the Naval Academy, did you always do your best? And Carter was about ready to answer yes when he reflected on the conversations that they had been having. And the demand for excellence that Rickover wanted out of the people who were part of the nuclear Navy, and he said, upon thinking about it, no, I didn't. I could have studied harder for tests.
I could have performed better in athletics. I could have learned more about our enemies. And then Rickover ended the conversation with, Well, why didn't you? And that really became this moment for Carter of realization that by him not always trying to do his best, it was limiting him in so many different ways. And it changed his whole approach on life.
So, I mean, that's just one example, but I've had so many mistakes and misfortunes and bumps along the way. And that is what has allowed me to learn and become better.
When you wrote Passion Struck, I was advised once upon a time that if you write a book, you try not to write it for everyone. You try to write it for maybe one person that you really have in mind. Who did you write Passion Struck for in a way?
I guess if I would say I wrote it for anyone, I wrote it for my two kids and their generation. This world that they're entering professionally is so far different from the life that I entered. I mean, we both walked into it feeling that we were facing change and things were happening faster than they were for those before us. But change is happening at such a rapid pace now
But not only that, I think we're at a huge inflection point where the world tends to be cyclical. And I write about something in the book called social impact theory, where over periods of time, history tends to repeat itself. And I think we're at the state now of going into one of these cycles.
And we have over the past hundred years been in the cycle where we are breaking out of people being entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurship has been on a decline ever since the 1970s. More and more people are unwilling to make the risk. And instead, they're going for the comfort of joining a more established company.
But I think we're entering a state that just as in times before us, there were individual jobs like a blacksmith, etc., a baker that people would do. I think in this new digital economy, we're going to have the same thing where there's a real opportunity for people instead of being employed by one company.
Where what I have learned working for them is if there's anything that they can do to make more money or lower expenses, they're going to take that opportunity at the expense of you. For you to position yourself as an individual entrepreneur where you're almost a solo agent working for a collection of businesses and living life more on your own terms.
Now, in order to do this, it's going to mean throwing out the book that my generation and I would say even the millennials, certainly my parents' and grandparents' generations lived by before us, that you basically have this recipe. You're born, you go to schooling, get a college degree or go to a trade school, get this job where you kind of lead this portfolio career, have kids along the way.
retire, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I think more and more people have an opportunity to break out of that matrix that we've kind of been confined in and to live their life differently with more freedom and autonomy.
If you look at the whole educational system in the United States, I mean, you look back upon Rockefeller and when his oil empire was broken up, what he and others at that time were trying to do where they were trying to get rid of freer thinkers. They were trying to create more conformists because we needed people in factories.
We needed people doing jobs at that time that were repetitive in nature. And so our whole education system has really been fueled to go down this set path that I'm talking about. And so large institutions, our education systems, and our even government has missed this inflection point that we're in right now Hmm. Hmm.
Yeah, I love that. Just to tie up, one thing that we always do with our guests is a quick lightning round. These are just short responses, but give some insight for our listeners. And so if you don't mind, for you, what's one of your favorite quotes that you tend to reference most?
Well, there are a ton of quotes that I love, but I think the one that I've been using most recently, do you know who Sharon Salzberg is? I don't. Sharon Salzberg is a New York Times bestselling author. She's probably one of the most well-known meditation experts in the entire world, has been working with the Dalai Lama since she was in her early 20s.
She has this great quote, there's no commodity that we can take with us. There's only our lives and whether we live them wisely or whether we live them in ignorance. And this is everything. And when I think about what she's talking about here, I discuss in the book that a lot of people hear this phrase that they're living life on autopilot.
And I think it's the wrong analogy for how so many of us are living our lives today. Because when we're on autopilot, we're typically doing the same thing, but it's generally taking us into a positive direction. I think the better metaphor for how so many of us are living our lives is
is a pinball we let the world around us influence everything we do and we get so distracted just as you do in the game of pinball by the noises the lights in human life social media influencers all these people who tell us we need to be more that we're not intentional about learning how to play the game instead of it playing us. And I think that's exactly what Sharon was talking about here.
You can make the choice to live intentionally and live your life wisely, or you can choose to continue to live it as a pinball and live in ignorance and never achieve the potential that you could.
So good. In relation to that and some of the things that you said, what's one thing that you own that you should probably throw out?
So I remember earlier in my life, it was like I wanted to have bigger and bigger houses. I think we all think about having more than our parents did. And I've certainly reached that point. I'm now in a stage in my life where both my kids are out of the house and I'm now trying to downsize. And I recently had had my house on the market. And in order to do that, I had to declutter everything.
the house and so it's amazing once you do that how much you realize certain things you don't even miss a month later and what you do miss so one of the things that I have really missed is I had to put away my record collection and my record player, and I have really missed that enjoyment in my life.
But what I have missed was I have a whole bunch of DVDs that I've had for years that I don't know why I've saved that I haven't even thought about watching over the past four to six weeks. So I would get rid of those DVDs. I think another thing that I need to get rid of is right now I looked in my garage and I love to cook and I think I have five different grills.
So I think I need to get that down too. But there are a bunch of other things from shoes and clothing that I need to declutter. And I think Gretchen Rubin has a great book on this where it's called Outer Order Inner Calm. And there is such truth to simplifying your life and how much it will bring you that inner calm and confidence if you do so.
Oh, love that. Yeah, we accumulate so much over life and thinking it makes us bigger, but then it actually just adds a lot of stress in many cases and more things to manage, right? I always like to say I'd prefer to be friends with a guy that has a boat than have one. Yep. I love this. Thank you so much.
This has been a really enlightening episode just because of your history being so unique in your pathway and some of the lessons and frankly, some of the lessons you learned not just from your own life, but from some of the people you've interviewed.
So I'd kind of like to end on this quote. Buddhist philosopher Dasaku Ikeda said, what is defeat in life? It's not merely making a mistake. Defeat means giving up on yourself in the midst of difficulty. What's true success in life? True success means winning your battle with yourself.
Those who persist in the pursuit of their dreams, no matter what the hurdles, are winners in life for they have won over their weaknesses. And I bring that up because I think it was a quirk kind of a core theme to everything that you were asking me today. And it's a core theme to my book. And you can find this, if you want to learn more about me, at johnrmiles, r is my middle initial, dot com.
And if you want to learn more about the Passion Struck podcast, Passion Struck Movement, and some of the educational things we're doing, then you can go to passionstruck.com.
John, thanks for your time so much today. Great interview.
Yeah, Adam, thank you so much for having me. It was such an honor to be here.
If you enjoy this podcast, please make sure to subscribe. And to stay updated on everything that the Action Catalyst is up to, make sure to follow us on Facebook and Instagram at Action Catalyst Podcast and on Twitter at Catalyst underscore Action. And thanks for listening.
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 are 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.