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Coming up next on Passion Strike.
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All these little choices we make throughout the day, if we have and most people don t have an intentional set of values or an intentional purpose for their lives, but let s say you set a list of core values that are important to you.
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Nobody s perfect.
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So all these micro choices and the big goals that we have, it s a journey.
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And I think too many beat themselves up when they make a few small wrong choices instead of continuing to cultivate, to lead a life that creates more and more value in the world and learn from those mistakes.
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Welcome to Passion Struck.
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Hi, I m your host, Jon R. Miles, and on the show, we decipher the secrets, tips, and guidance of the world s most inspiring people and turn their wisdom into practical advice for you and those around you.
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Our mission is to help you unlock the power of intentionality so that you can become the best version of yourself.
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If you re new to the show, I offer advice and answer listener questions on Fridays.
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We have long-form interviews the rest of the week with guests ranging from astronauts to authors, CEOs, creators, innovators, scientists, military leaders, visionaries, and athletes.
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Now, let s go out there and become Passion Struck.
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Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Episode 379 of Passion Struck, the number one alternative health podcast.
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And thank you to all of you who come back to the show weekly to listen and learn how to live better, be better and impact the world.
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If you re new to the show, thank you so much for being here.
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Or you simply want to introduce this to a friend or a family member.
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And we love it when you do that.
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We have Episode Starter Packs, which are collections of our fans  favorite episodes that we organize into convenient playlists that give any new listener a great way to get acclimated to everything we do here on the show.
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Either go to spotify or passionstruck.com slash starter packs to get started.
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I am also so excited to announce that my new book, Passionstruck, is now available for pre-order, and you can find it at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or on the Passionstruck website.
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Starting in December, I will be using my solo episodes to discuss different aspects of the book leading up to its launch, and in January, I m going to feature different guests I talk about in the book.
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And in case you missed it earlier in the week, I had a fantastic interview with Dr. Nicole LePera, a number one New York Times bestselling author and a luminary in holistic psychology.
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We discussed her new groundbreaking book, How to Be the Love You Seek, where she proposes that healing our relationships first requires addressing the relationship we have with ourselves.
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I also wanted to say thank you for your ratings and reviews, and if you loved today s episode or that one with Dr. LaPera, we would appreciate you giving it a five-star review and sharing it with your friends and families.
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I know we and our guests love to see comments from our listeners, and that goes such a long way into bringing more people into the Passion Star community.
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Today, I have a truly exceptional guest joining us, someone whose work is changing the way we view success, both in business and in parenting.
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My guest today is none other than Lee Benson.
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The author of not one but two remarkable books that delve deep into the realm of success, his books Your Most Important Number and Value Creation Kid offer invaluable wisdom that can revolutionize the way we approach life s challenges.
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But before we dive into these two captivating works, let s set the stage.
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We all want to be the best for our children.
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don t we?
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We aim to protect them from hardships and create a comfortable nurturing environment.
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However, what if, in doing so, we unintentionally hinder their potential for success outside the safety of our homes?
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Kids need healthy struggles to succeed.
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That s the mantra we ll be exploring today.
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In Lee s latest book, Value Creation Kid, he offers a roadmap for parents, helping them equip their children with the superpower of turning every life experience into a valuable lesson.
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It s a true antidote to safeguarding our kids against the perils of entitlement and complacency.
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Lee and I discussed the recipe for creating a fun value creation learning environment at home, learning how to transform healthy struggles into capabilities and confidence, and discovering practical financial literacy skills that empower our kids to manage their finances wisely.
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Plus, we ll delve into Lee s revolutionary Gravy Stack banking app designed to nurture personal responsibility and grit in our young ones.
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That s not all.
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We also dive deep into Lee s business acumen as we explore your most important number.
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As someone who grew up in his business from just three employees to a staggering 500, achieving 15 consecutive years of 20% compounded annual growth, Lee knows a thing or two about his numbers.
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methodology, the MIND system, known as Most Important Number in Drivers, has been hailed by none other than Jack Welch, the former CEO of General Electric, as the best management operating system that he s ever seen.
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Lee guides us in setting our own most important number, crafting drivers to improve that number, and aligning our efforts to achieve unparalleled success.
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Lee s journey is a testament to his expertise, and now he s on the mission to help others do the same.
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So without further ado, let s dive into this episode with Lee Benson.
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an entrepreneur, author, and visionary leader as we explore the power of numbers and the keys to raising confident, value-driven kids.
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Thank you for choosing PassionStruck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life.
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Now, let that journey begin.
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I am absolutely thrilled today to welcome Lee Benson to PassionStruck.
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Welcome, Lee.
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Great to be here.
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Thanks for having me.
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Lee, as I was researching your background, one of the things that struck out to me was that you re a musician.
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And I know for me, when I am having stress and I need to relax, I need to get that energy out.
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I love playing the drums.
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And I bring this up because I understand that your first business was actually a band you were in that played, if I have it right, 300 nights a year in different clubs.
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Yeah, back in the eighties, that s how I made most of my money.
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And I say I m on my seventh business.
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I ve started from scratch and I don t actually count that one, but it really was a business.
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We had a sound crew, a light crew, went through several rhythm sections through the eighties and played well over a thousand nights out in clubs and concerts in the eighties.
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And it was just an absolute blast.
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Absolute blast.
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Well, I m interested to explore this just a little bit more because I have two grown kids.
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One is 25, one is 19 and the 25 year old is a drummer.
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They all can play piano, but he s trying to become a percussionist in a band.
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And I d like to understand what are some of the vital lessons that you learned from that initial experience of being in a band?
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Yeah, that s such a great question.
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Well, for me I needed to make money so we worked a lot and that was fantastic.
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And I remember each time the crowds will get a little bit bigger I would be caught up in that and there would be a high associated with it and the crowds could range from a couple of folks to 5000.
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And then you re always looking for that next sort of high.
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And then something hit me early on a few years into it.
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And I just said, look, what s really important is the emotional energy that we re conveying from the music that we re making.
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So I got to a place where I didn t care if only the cook and bartender showed up.
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It was so cool what we were doing on stage and what that actually felt like.
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And I think today it s more difficult to make a living as a musician, for sure, depending on the type of music and where you re going, than it was back when I was doing it.
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But if it s about the music and the emotional energy that you re creating in the world and you make it about that and you really do what you love, I, there s no end to where that can really go.
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And the musician friends that I know that are older, like myself, some of them, they fully live that.
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And I still stay in touch with them and they re very happy and fulfilled.
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And others were more about the high of the attention and hoping to make money and it didn t work out like they wanted.
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And they re not quite so happy and fulfilled in their lives.
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creation of positive emotional energy in the world I think is wildly important.
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Music is such a great way to do it.
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That s interesting to me because when I think of bands and musicians, they were some of the first, I guess you could say global content creators in a way.
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And when I think of those of us who put on podcasts or run YouTube channels or other forms of content creation, you see some who are exploding.
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I ll just take Jay Shetty as an example.
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and others who struggle.
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And it s interesting when you look at the parallels of how we hear about one hit wonders.
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But when I look at some of these bands, let s just take the Rolling Stone, who has dozens and dozens of albums, not every song of theirs ever hit.
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It s just not every piece of content is going to hit.
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And so to me, it s always been an interesting parallel because what I ve learned from it is you have just got to keep creating because eventually
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your content will catch on if you re adamant about putting it out there and you re doing it for the right purpose.
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At least that s what I feel.
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Do you have any views on that?
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Well, I think that s right, that you re creating for the right reasons.
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You re really passionate about it and you keep going deeper and deeper in what you re trying to convey.
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That becomes wildly interesting.
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And there s so many out there that just, for example, writing a book, Hey, I ve got a book.
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And people will congratulate the individual.
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Oh, you wrote a book.
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What are you so excited to be an author?
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And from my view, and I ve written two books, I m starting a third book.
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I don t really care about being an author.
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What I care about is moving the needle.
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So the real question is, how did you move the needle to make the world a better place?
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How did you create more material, spiritual, emotional value in the world because of what you were doing?
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That s the question.
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getting a degree at a prestigious college.
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Oh, you went there.
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That s so amazing.
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You must be so proud.
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In my view, that s not the question.
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The purpose of an education is to create value in the world.
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How are you using it to create value?
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And so I think you re right on.
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Create the content, be passionate about what you re doing, and you re constantly pushing the bar on the deeper understanding and value that you re communicating through the work.
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Does that resonate?
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Yeah, it resonates for me.
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And I think everyone has their starting point and what they re comfortable with.
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For me, it s always been writing.
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So long before I even thought about doing this podcast, I was putting blog articles out both on my website and on other sites just to see what was resonating, what wasn t.
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And when you start doing that, you learn
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over time become more vulnerable about what you re sharing and I think you lean more and more into the core message whether it s like you said value creation from your standpoint or for me how to create a life that really matters how do you create the intentional desire to become who you re supposed to be and what I found is that by examining what was catching on
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It allowed me to produce more content that I knew was going to resonate.
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And then when I had the podcast, I just have followed that same trend.
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And like you re saying, keep going deeper and deeper.
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And I have my own book coming out in February.
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And like you said, it would be great to hit one of those lists, but the reason I did it was because I m trying to impact people.
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And similar to you, try to make the world a better place and create some systemic change in the way people are living.
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Yeah, and love what you re saying there, because I really think that s what it s about.
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My experience is that most people, when it comes to virtue, they practice virtue signaling over actually practicing virtue.
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And what I mean by that is, if you re practicing virtue, from my view, you re intentionally leaning in to create more and more value in the world.
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And at the same time, you re intentionally leaning in to push back things that are taking value out of the world, even at a micro scale and a macro scale and everything in between.
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And I think that s what this is really all about.
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But so many people will say they re doing this for the right reasons, just to look a certain way.
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What are your thoughts on that?
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Really curious to understand.
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Well, I am so glad you brought this up.
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Similar to you, I ve had a long corporate career before I started doing what I was doing today.
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And I remember one of my most influential bosses I ever had, his name is Jay Skibinski, and he was the chief information officer when I was at Lendlease.
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And I remember Jay was always giving me these mentoring sessions.
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And in one of them, he said, John, you ve got to really look at not what people are saying, but what their actions are, because people speak with their feet.
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And that was one of the most profound lessons, as simple as it sounds, that I ve ever had.
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It s actually a chapter in my book, because
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People like to say the right thing.
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They like to proclaim that they buy into a strategy, they buy into eating well, they buy into feeling well emotionally, whatever it may be.
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But then you see them walk out of the meeting or walk out of that conversation and their actions are completely in a different direction from what s coming out of their mouth.
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And I m sure you ve seen this at play more times than you d probably like to think about.
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Yeah, I see it a lot, especially with our elected officials where they re for some moral cause, but their actions are completely the opposite of it.
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And collectively we should be doing things that create better conditions to work, live, learn, and play.
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And we should be getting better at delivering those things because the incremental costs are going down.
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So like return on taxpayer investment, but also within any organization, are we getting better at what we re doing?
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Yes or no.
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And really lean in again, create, let s create value in the world.
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Let s do it at scale if we can, but even one on one, it makes a difference, touch the right person, and it can really impact the world.
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But I don t think it can just be that I think we intentionally have to be stopping things that are taking value out of the world at the same time, I think it has to be both.
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Because just being quiet and allowing certain things to happen that are definitely not good for
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the health of families and communities can offset any good that you re doing.
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So I believe it has to be both.
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What do you think about that, John?
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Well, I do think it has to be both.
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And I think so often times people talk about having core values, but they don t live their core values.
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And I think that s the critical difference is if you re truly living your core values, then every intentional action that you re taking is taking you closer to the desired outcome.
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long-term that you want to be.
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And I think that s where people lose sight of the power of micro-choice is too many people concentrate, I think, on these defining moments, let s call them in their lives.
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And they don t spend enough time looking at what s happening in the seconds, minutes, hours that make up every single day and how they re applying themselves intentionally in those moments.
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And you just brought up some great examples of politicians, and we see that worldwide, not just in the U.S.
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Ours is a mess right now.
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But you do see so many people who are saying one thing and then absolutely doing the opposite or doing something that s sending the wrong message that s incrementally different from what you would think their goal would be that they have in their mind to accomplish.
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I love what you said about the power of micro choice and all these little choices we make throughout the day.
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If we have and most people don t have an intentional set of values or an intentional purpose for their lives.
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But let s say you set a list of core values that are important to you.
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Nobody s perfect.
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So all these micro choices and the big goals that we have, it s a journey.
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And I think too many beat themselves up when they make a few small wrong choices, instead of continuing to cultivate to lead a life that creates more and more value in the world.
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and learn from those mistakes along the way.
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I know you re really big on intentionality, and I think that would be great for all of us to continually do better and cultivate.
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For me, when I work with organizations, for-profits and non-profits, it s all about helping them create value faster in the world.
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And we actually assign a most important number for each organization that says above all others they re winning or losing the game, and it drives the majority
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of the right behaviors.
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So this is a journey to watch them start at a starting point, creating value.
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And then at the end of the first year, it s like talking to completely different people, the same people, they re just talking about creating value in such a better way.
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And then it accelerates in year two, and even more in year three going forward.
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So it s this whole cultivation that
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process that you go through.
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I think if we do have, to your point, a set of core values, and we re trying to live those, the micro choices, the big goals all matter.
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But how we think about cultivating and going down that road on our journey, and being friendly with ourselves around that and not being too hard, I think is wildly important.
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Well, Lee, today we re going to talk about two different things.
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You ve got two great books that you ve written that you mentioned before.
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One is called your most important number.
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And the second is your more recent book called the value creation kit.
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And I m going to start out with your most important number and go down that path.
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And then later on, we ll get to your second book.
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But something you and I have in common is we ve both had a pretty extensive career where we ve both been part of many different businesses.
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You have been in the leadership chair, transforming these businesses.
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I ve done it as a practice leader in a big four consulting firm when I was in industry and then as a private equity partner.
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And it s interesting because people.
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always ask me, how can you be in all these different industries that you ve been in?
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And what I find, and I m not sure if you agree or not, is that about 80% of what I ve seen across different companies is pretty much the same.
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It s the 20% that s really different.
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I would agree.
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And I had a dinner for a group of friends a couple of weeks ago and one of the gals at dinner said, look, I ve got my MBA.
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I work with my father and we help companies position for exits.
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And it s amazing work and I love it.
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And she said, everything that I learned getting my MBA
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didn t include what she considered to be the most valuable piece that was missing, which is the people piece.
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Like all the messiness of egos and personalities and being at different levels on their professional maturity growth curve.
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And that s the magic is making that happen.
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So what I find is that really doesn t depend on the business so much.
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The issues are the same, 80%.
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You have sales, you have marketing, you have all the functions.
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But the real X factor in making things go is getting the people fully aligned in the middle of what can be a lot of messiness because of the personalities and traits of the senior team members and the leaders throughout the organization.
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Yeah.
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I m so glad you brought that up because I know what we re going to be talking about today as it pertains to your book is how do you get everyone fully aligned, organized and going in the same direction?
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But I always found this,
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to be the dilemma when I was in companies because typically I was in the IT organization and it s one of those few organizations within a company that touches everyone.
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And so you really get to see all aspects of the companies that you re in.
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And as I was in these functions, you would see companies performing well or you would see projects performing badly.
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And I began to see this recurring pattern of when things were not going as they should.
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And I started referring to it as people become their own visionary arsonist.
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And what I mean about that is we all have these good intentions, but we end up arsoning the very things that we re trying to create.
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And it s primarily because of the things that you brought up about not understanding emotional intelligence, not understanding how to have the right conversation, trying too much to overpower someone, letting your ego get in the way.
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that you end up destroying the good value that you have and eroding trust.
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And that s one of the common things that I saw across the board between companies, as Jim Collins would say, that are great to those that are just getting by.
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I don t know if you ve seen something similar to that.
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Yeah, when I see this, I don t complain about it at all.
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I actually get excited the more messy it is because once you clean it up, you can accelerate value creation.
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If it s a perfect environment, everything s fully aligned and they re doing okay and there s not much to fix, my gosh, maybe we re in the wrong business.
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We need a different product or service that we can actually scale.
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But I look at it and say the highest level leadership work I can do and I think any leader can do is organize all of that human nature messiness to get it fully aligned, making better decisions.
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really driving a culture or creating a culture of accountability.
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And that s amazing work.
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That s where we create the absolute most value.
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And I see a lot give up.
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They get frustrated.
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They point fingers like, Oh, they don t get it.
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They re there.
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I can t believe this is going on.
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That s going on.
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I look at it and say, wow, this is where we re going.
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The value that we want to create now let s talk about productive ways to get there.
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And I think most leaders would do themselves a huge favor if they, the majority of the time talk passionately about where they re going, what s possible.
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and productive ways to get there.
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And that actually becomes infectious.
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And my experience and all the businesses that I ve started and exited so far, the biggest one had just over 500 employees at the peak.
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And every single time, having an intentional way of connecting culture to performance, within six months max, everybody is acting like the CEO of their own role.
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They re aligned, they re going in the same direction.
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And then how do you even do that?
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Because foundationally, I think one of the biggest problems in organizations is we re not telling people exactly how they create value for the organization, aligning them.
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If you ask a leader, how do you create value for the organization or a non-supervisor team member, typically they give you a job description.
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Whereas what I talk about in my book titled your most important number is something called the mind methodology where every team has a most important number.
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And they have a set of drivers, which reflects the best work they re doing to improve that number.
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And at any point in time, are you on track Everest behind or hopefully even over driving your most important number.
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And now when you ask a leader.
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How do you create value for the organization?
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They say, well, I m in marketing, and we create value, for example, by generating more and more qualified leads.
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And here are the characteristics of a qualified lead, including average minimum closing percentage.
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And this is the best work that we re doing to continually improve the number of qualified leads coming in.
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That s a pretty powerful answer.
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And anybody deploying this methodology, every single leader of every function and every team in the organization
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thinks that way, they operate that way, and non-supervisory team members say, this is my team, this is our number, here s my role, here s the outcomes I m responsible for, this is the best work I m doing to help the team stay on track.
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Now we ve got something really powerful, and it s so easy to align every team in the organization, because when yours improves, the next one up should improve, the next one up all the way to the very top of the company, whether it s for-profit or non-profit.
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So I think, John, that s really the foundational thing that has to be solved for.
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If not, it s hard to hold it together.
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It looks very disorganized and a lot of dysfunction will come out because of human nature.
2
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Well, I want to backtrack on that for a couple questions.
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First, I wanted to go into a lot of companies that I ve been a part of and have advised.
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We ll say at the top that we want to make X amount of profit or whatever strategy they have for aligning themselves with their shareholders.
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then they want to cascade that all the way down from the top to the frontline workers to great goals that people can do to support that.
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And what I have seen is that the leaders come out of these big executive meetings where the CEO or whoever
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gives out this lofty mission and what they want to accomplish and they get excited about it.
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But then when you talk to leaders and individual contributors, a few layers down in the organization, especially if you re talking, let s say a company like the size of Lowe s, we had 350,000 employees.
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What you find is that they don t understand the alignment.
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Why do you think traditional goal setting is such a fundamental challenge?
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I just never seen it work at scale and almost in any situation over time.
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I just haven t.
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And I think the reason it s a challenge at the top, which I think is fundamentally flawed to say, Hey, we want to go forth and make this much profit or this much positive cashflow.
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Everybody create goals that s fully aligned with that.
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Well, most team members don t even really know how to create meaningful goals.
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Typical experience would be, Hey, every quarter, create one to three goals, get it approved by your manager and rinse and repeat every quarter.
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that feels terrible for most team members.
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It just does.
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On paper, it might look good from the top, but it just doesn t feel very good.
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But if you have a team that is supposed to generate, let s say, qualified leads, or close sales, or something around customer service, or production, delivery of service, finance, and each of those teams or functions have most important numbers, and every team within the function has a most important number that does the two things that I mentioned earlier,
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It says above all of the numbers, you re winning or losing the game, and it drives the majority of the right behaviors.
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Now, everybody s around that game, almost like you re playing pick your sport, but you re in the Super Bowl, it s tied, it s halftime, and your job is to win the game.
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You can see that score.
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You re still measuring other things to help you make better decisions to
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to win with that primary number.
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But everybody can see it.
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Everybody is circling around that to make it happen.
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And you can so easily and simply just connect all of them as you map it through the organization.
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But on the goal side, I work with, and I bet you ve seen this, John, I ve worked with so many different companies of all sizes.
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Even today, my smallest client is a startup with a couple of people.
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My largest client has a market cap of $50 billion.
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And I look at the goals and 90 plus percent of the goals are just not very thoughtful.
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And so I don t know why we keep doing something that doesn t really work.
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And that s a big part of why I developed this mind methodology.
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Which interestingly, by the way, Jack Welch, a former CEO of General Electric, he became my business partner in 2011.
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And he told me this was the best business management system he s ever seen.
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And if he had it when he was running General Electric, he would have put it into every business unit that he had because of the complexity of what they were doing over there.
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So why we keep doing this, I m not really sure.
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It s super entrenched as an idea, but I m on a mission over the next 10 years to completely change that.
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One of the things that we re hearing about all the time right now is employee engagement and how it s down, not just in the United States, but in countries across the entire world.
2
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What do you think is causing this massive decline in employee engagement and how can MIND, if applied correctly, help to fix it?
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Yeah, I always ask engaged with what?
2
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Right?
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So you do satisfaction surveys, how engaged are you and they rate themselves or whatever.
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I think that s useless in my view.
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And what I would like in all my companies is what I ve been able to do.
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And with the clients I work with, we want them engaged with creating value.
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And what s really cool about the mind methodology is that when teams start to really win, they re accomplishing challenging things, they re hitting their most important number at any point in time.
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So let s say it s gross profit or cashflow.
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And we start here, we want to end up there in 12 months or 36 months.
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At any point in time, are we on track below or above the line?
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And when you re winning in a big way, it just feels incredibly good.
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And so I watched this intrinsic motivation, this self-esteem rise within every single team member as they re going through this winning and accomplishing challenging things.
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And they just inherently become a whole lot more engaged.
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They run through walls for the organization.
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They can t wait to get in and keep solving problems and continuing to win.
3
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It feels incredible.
3
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And the value creation that I talk about, I mentioned it before we started this discussion for the interview, is in three buckets.
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It s material value, things, money, etc.
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It s emotional energy value, which I think is the scarcest commodity on the planet.
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And then there s spiritual value, connectedness to the community.
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Maybe you re deeply religious, you re spiritual.
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It s different for everybody.
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Everybody plays in all those buckets.
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But I think we re creating value for every single stakeholder that s being affected by the work you do in an organization, the team members, the shareholders, the communities that your team members live in, the customers, all of it.
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We re thinking about creating value when they re winning.
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It feels good.
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And they re inherently engaged.
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I don t need to go do a survey to see that people aren t engaged.
3
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And what am I going to do have a, we need a best friend at work campaigns, the more engaged along those lines.
3
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So the mind methodology really sets teams up to win.
3
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It provides that clarity around what winning looks like the value they re designed to create.
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And again, it just feels good.
3
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And they re a lot more engaged around that.
3
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So really quick, if I was just going to take a practical example of the mind methodology, when I work with clients and some of these larger thousands of employees and many smaller, but the HR leader, when we start, we ll say, well, we think our most important number should be either retention or engagement.
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And I said, all right, well, remember, the number has to say above all others, you re winning or losing.
3
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And second, very importantly, has to drive the majority of the right behaviors.
3
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And this is such a great example.
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I said, okay, so you hire me as your HR leader, three years down the road, it s retention.
3
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And I ve kept 95% of everybody, nobody in the industry has ever hit that level of retention, never mind that 80 plus percent of our team members can t deliver on the outcome based responsibilities for their role.
3
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So I just drove all the wrong behaviors.
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A better most important number for the people function or HR, in my opinion, would be the percentage of seats filled with capable people.
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Every role is clearly defined.
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The outcome-based responsibilities that are measurable are defined no more than two to four, and a list of capabilities they need to have to be able to achieve those.
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So which percentage of the folks sitting in these roles are delivering or over-delivering, and which percentage is under-delivering?
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Now we re driving more of the right behaviors.
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We re recruiting better, we re onboarding better, we re training better, providing leaders with better tools to develop their teams and themselves.
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That s how to think about this.
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And every team has to be part of coming up with their most important number in the categories of work that they can basically leverage to continually improve that number.
3
SPEAKER_00
Well, thank you for sharing that because I was going to ask you, what s the clearest indicator of whether your organization is winning or losing?
3
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And I think that s a great example of that.
3
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And again, every team goes through that process.
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What s important in going back to his engagement with the right stuff, which is I think engaged in creating more and more value over time and accelerating it is they have to own it.
3
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And so if we re going in, we re not going to just give it to them.
3
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And I ve seen a lot of companies are just completely top-down command and control.
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We re going to make this much profit or this much shareholder value in the future.
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Everybody will do this.
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They don t own it.
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They re not nearly as motivated or engaged.
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We want them to own it.
3
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And if they create it, they own it a lot higher percentage of the time, which is super obvious, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
It is.
3
SPEAKER_00
One of the things I ve always struggled with is when you re putting in a business management system like MIND, how do you do the proper balancing between simplicity, because it needs to be simple so everyone gets it, with the effectiveness of developing it?
3
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I think that the real key here with the MIND methodology is around its simplicity.
3
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Every team has one measure that basically measures the value they re designed to create.
3
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The organization has one, profit or cash flow in the for-profit world typically, and impact in the non-profit world.
3
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And then as you go down through the organization, you can see that it s so simple, so elegant, so direct, you can bolt it together, whether you have five teams in an organization, 500 teams, or 5000 teams, it really doesn t matter.
3
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And when you look at a team,
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What would you want to know if you and I were running a 10,000 person organization?
3
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What would we want to know when we look at each function in each team?
3
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Well, I want to know, how are they creating value?
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And now we can see the measure of it.
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What s the best work they re doing to continually improve that?
3
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In this methodology, and I ve created over the years with my team software to hold it together, and I think tools matter for efficiency for sure.
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Within seconds, I can see every team in exactly how they measure their value, exactly the work they re doing to create it.
3
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And I know within 15 minutes, whether or not they re checking a box or they re fully leaning in to create that value.
3
SPEAKER_00
Well, thank you for that, Lee.
3
SPEAKER_00
And I wanted to switch gears here because whenever I have a successful executive like yourself on the show, I know that there are many listeners who we can help because we ve all faced many of the same work-life balance type of issues.
3
SPEAKER_00
And before we got on the show today, you were mentioning to me
3
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an episode I recently did with Dr. Neha Sangwan.
3
SPEAKER_00
I think it was episode 348, but we were talking about spiritual burnout.
3
SPEAKER_00
And I understand that in addition to playing guitar, you like reading and exercising, etc.
3
SPEAKER_00
How do you use your hobbies and other things in your life to contribute and balance your career life so that you have overall well-being?
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That s a great question.
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If I was to pick, which it is, the most important number for myself, it would be an internal fulfillment quotient, really.
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I think the purpose of life is to elevate human consciousness, starting with your own, or a simpler way to say it is the purpose of life is to figure stuff out.
3
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The more we figure out, the easier things become, the less things bother us, the more value that we can create in the world.
3
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And I just align everything to that.
3
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And the reason I m here is to push this whole concept, for lack of a better term, value creationism.
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We re here to create value and everybody on the planet strove to have throughout their entire life.
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And that effect is they develop one more unit of
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material value, one more unit of a positive emotional energy value than they consumed and one more unit of spiritual value.
3
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What an amazing place this would be going in.
3
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So I keep holding on to that.
3
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And it seems like there s just an endless bucket of energy.
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I ll have days where I m a little bit less motivated than others.
3
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I never really get down for the most part.
3
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I never feel lonely.
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I m always driving forward.
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And I might, my brain s always in this place.
3
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And I talked about earlier of talking about what s possible, but passionately talking about it.
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All I want to focus on is productive ways of getting there.
3
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And it seems that they ll just, and I think this is probably a global problem, but in the United States, culturally, everybody seems to be an expert on what s wrong with people, what s wrong with things and why stuff won t work.
3
SPEAKER_01
And so I quickly divert it back over on the other side and that when it s all in this spirit of creating value in the world, it fills my cup and it just stays that way.
3
SPEAKER_01
Does that help?
3
SPEAKER_00
That helps, and I think a secondary question to that would be, you re now consulting, as you mentioned, to small and large companies.
3
SPEAKER_00
You re writing books, you re considering starting a podcast in the near future.
3
SPEAKER_00
How do you stay passionate and motivated in your various endeavors, and what advice would you have for others
3
SPEAKER_00
and how they can balance their aspirations when I know for many people, they re feeling like I ve got my family and that s a stress on its own.
3
SPEAKER_00
I ve got my career.
3
SPEAKER_00
How can I possibly do one more thing?
3
SPEAKER_01
Life is one big blended mix of all kinds of stuff.
3
SPEAKER_01
And it s full of decisions.
3
SPEAKER_01
And if you spend more time on family stuff, you have less time for business and vice versa.
3
SPEAKER_01
Same thing with hobbies.
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For me, there s so many things I ve done.
3
SPEAKER_01
I ve taught martial arts for a lot of years, playing in bands, and I m actually calling for my music studio here at home today.
3
SPEAKER_01
for me, I have to lean in and do what I talk about.
3
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And that keeps me going.
3
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I see a lot of folks that they re on the speaking circuit, and they haven t done the thing they re talking about some of them for decades, and they get paid really well to go talk about it.
3
SPEAKER_01
And most of them are so disconnected from actually doing this stuff that I can see it and how they present it when what goes forward.
3
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So for me, it keeps me energized being on the front line with clients.
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And when I think about family, or my business or my clients businesses,
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All of them should be designed to create value.
3
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The second book that I wrote titled Value Creation Kid, the subtitle is The Healthy Struggles Your Children Need to Succeed, is all about operationalizing value creation in the family.
3
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And so all of these stressors and things that are going on, I go back to kids need to struggle more, preferably in healthy ways to launch into adulthood as these self-reliant value creating financially competent adults.
3
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And if we design that early and go all the way through, wow, would that make a difference in the world?
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And that s really my mission on that side.
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author having this applied in at least a million homes within three to five years, and then scale up from there just in the US.
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I would encourage listeners, and I think about this a lot, and I counsel my friends with businesses when they start acting almost like victims, oh, this is stressful, that s stressful.
4
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Well, wait a minute, this is the highest level leadership work you can do is organizing the stress into something that creates more and more value over time.
4
SPEAKER_01
And then it becomes solid, it becomes a lot of fun.
4
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Very short, three-part story.
4
SPEAKER_01
So I m following a number of low and middle income families around the value creation kid practices.
4
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We call it the gravy stack method.
4
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There s four parts to it.
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There s value creation, there s house rules, your job for the family, there s financial competency, and there s healthy struggle.
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One parent, and this book came out last April this year,
4
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A couple months into it, he texts me and says, and again, I m staying in touch with him to follow how it s working.
4
SPEAKER_01
This is something my 11 year old daughter told me today.
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Daddy, thank you for saving the dirty dishes for me to help me with my value creation work.
4
SPEAKER_01
And I thought, wow, that s pretty cool.
4
SPEAKER_01
And then he calls about a month later.
4
SPEAKER_01
And he says, let me tell you how value creation summer is going.
4
SPEAKER_01
And he has two girls, nine and six.
4
SPEAKER_01
My girls used to argue over how, who has to do the work.
4
SPEAKER_01
And now they re arguing over who gets to do the work.
4
SPEAKER_01
And the six-year-old is intentionally getting up before the nine-year-old to walk the dog and do all these other things to get her value creation points.
4
SPEAKER_01
That s incredible.
4
SPEAKER_01
And then the last part of this, and this was probably a little over a week ago.
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We spent an hour on the phone and he said, on day one, my nine-year-old, first day in middle school, meets with a counselor as part of their process.
4
SPEAKER_01
And on day two, the counselor calls the dad and asks the question, what is value creation summer?
4
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Tell me all about this.
4
SPEAKER_01
And she said, I m going to use this language with all of the other students and with the parents that I m working with as well.
4
SPEAKER_01
So it s cool how this is resonating so much with kids, this whole concept of value creation.
4
SPEAKER_01
What s your value creation superpower?
4
SPEAKER_01
School today, unfortunately, seems to be like money and memorization is education.
4
SPEAKER_01
Nope, it s not get a good grade, get a diploma, get a degree, get a job.
4
SPEAKER_01
The purpose of an education is to create value in the world.
4
SPEAKER_01
And let s help every kid discover their value creation superpowers.
4
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And when we don t do that, the current system, majority of kids are doing what they think they re supposed to do, instead of discovering what they re meant to do in the world.
4
SPEAKER_01
So all these stressors, let s change our perspective.
4
SPEAKER_01
Let s look at it differently.
4
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Our job is to organize this.
4
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It s easy to go down that road.
4
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It s probably easier to go down that road than the value creation road, but you re going to feel way better about yourself.
4
SPEAKER_01
Certainly I do, and my friends do when they practice.
4
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organizing it, creating value from it and realizing that as adults, these are the healthy struggles that we need to go through to be able to create more value in the future.
4
SPEAKER_01
And I was diagnosed six months ago with systemic lupus and boys, it s been an interesting ride.
4
SPEAKER_01
And I m finally getting a handle on the symptoms.
4
SPEAKER_01
And one of my friends, my coauthor, he goes, so what are you learning from this to be able to create more value in the future?
4
SPEAKER_01
And that s the perfect question instead of, are you okay?
4
SPEAKER_01
How much does it hurt today?
4
SPEAKER_01
and just waddling in, in what s going on.
4
SPEAKER_01
And I just, I love that.
4
SPEAKER_01
And that all that perspective, that approach, this value creation lens keeps my cup full.
4
SPEAKER_01
It just does.
4
SPEAKER_00
Well, I wanted to ask you a follow-on question because I had switched to your personal life because I wanted to do a natural transition into going into talking about families and kids and things outside of the work environment.
4
SPEAKER_00
But it s interesting.
4
SPEAKER_00
I was recently interviewing Jennifer Wallace and she has this new book out that s talking all about toxic achievement culture that s out there.
4
SPEAKER_00
And ultimately what she discovered as she was writing the book is that this achievement culture comes down to the influence that parents have on their kids.
4
SPEAKER_00
and what they re teaching them.
4
SPEAKER_00
And in many cases, what she discovered is that the parents didn t feel a sense of mattering in their life, and it was then trickling down and having an impact on the children on the concept of a child s sense of mattering.
4
SPEAKER_00
And I m going to ask the question this way.
4
SPEAKER_00
In Value Creation Kid, you stress the significance of making children feel that their struggles matter for their success.
4
SPEAKER_00
Could you share a personal experience or story that highlights the impact of this concept of a child s sense of mattering?
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, the value creation cycle that Scott Donnell and I talk about in our book starts with, hey, identify a capability you would like to have.
4
SPEAKER_01
So someday you can create value from it, then struggle to develop that capability that raises your self-confidence.
4
SPEAKER_01
You actually use it to create value and then you keep going on this wheel around.
4
SPEAKER_01
And you can have, and I think back to my childhood, I never really, as an adult, never think back that I was any kind of a victim or any of that.
4
SPEAKER_01
But my parents had a hard time.
4
SPEAKER_01
Raising themselves, let alone five kids, had some really bad stuff going on.
4
SPEAKER_01
Family members in and out of prison many times.
4
SPEAKER_01
It was a toxic and I would even say dangerous environment at times.
4
SPEAKER_01
But they were all in their own journey, doing their own stuff.
4
SPEAKER_01
And so what was different about me?
4
SPEAKER_01
And I started this value creation struggle cycle really early.
4
SPEAKER_01
Six years old, neighbor unsolicited asked me, hey, would you pull weeds in my garden for 25 cents an hour?
4
SPEAKER_01
And I talk about this in the book.
4
SPEAKER_01
Sure.
4
SPEAKER_01
And back then you could buy two candy bars and have change.
4
SPEAKER_01
So it was a good deal.
4
SPEAKER_01
And at least it was really hard work.
4
SPEAKER_01
What else could I do?
4
SPEAKER_01
And then I start shoveling snow, 50 cents a driveway and sidewalk.
4
SPEAKER_01
And I could do one every 30 minutes.
4
SPEAKER_01
I just fourfold my money.
4
SPEAKER_01
Then that led to a paper route, a dishwasher, a busboy, a cook, playing in a band, starting a business.
4
SPEAKER_01
I just kept going on this cycle.
4
SPEAKER_01
And I could trust that in the real world.
4
SPEAKER_01
And it really elevated my self-esteem.
4
SPEAKER_01
I was in control of my own life.
4
SPEAKER_01
By the time I was kicked out of the house at the beginning of my senior year in high school, I was already fully financially competent and independent.
4
SPEAKER_01
It was a non-event to get an apartment and be living on my own.
4
SPEAKER_01
It was a non-event.
4
SPEAKER_01
I spent one night in my truck sleeping, asked a friend in high school, anybody that needs a roommate.
4
SPEAKER_01
And one of them had an older brother and said,
4
SPEAKER_01
great.
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The next night, I had an apartment, I was good to go.
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So that s what saved me.
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And what I m really advocating for in the book is that when children start this value creation struggle cycle, and they learn to trust the struggle, and wow, that really worked.
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And even with the harder it gets, the warmer you feel inside knowing it s going to be incredible on the other side, because you ve lived it enough times now.
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I think that s the right perspectives.
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It didn t matter to me that others thought I mattered.
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What mattered was my internal self-esteem and fulfillment and the value that I was really creating in the world.
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And I don t think you have to start at six years old.
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I think you could start at 46 years old if you ve never thought about it this way.
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And then it s a journey and you keep going in that direction and be kind to yourself along the way.
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Nobody s perfect.
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Well, I m laughing over here, Lee, because you and I have a lot of similarities in our lives.
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I wouldn t say I got kicked out of my house, but my parents moved when I was a senior.
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And so I had to finish the year out without them being there.
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But interestingly enough, I grew up in Pennsylvania and like you, my parents didn t give us money besides the uniforms for our parochial schools, et cetera.
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And so if I wanted extra spending money,
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to use in the way that I wanted to, I had to go out there and find a way.
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And like you, I started mowing yards, and then when winter came, I would go out and shovel snow.
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If we were lucky, we would try to get a hold of one of our father s snowblowers, so it would make it easier.
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Oftentimes it was just us pushing the snow.
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And then I remember being in halfway through fifth grade and a paper route opened up.
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So I did that all the way throughout most of high school.
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And then as soon as I found a way, when I was 14, I got a job at the local supermarket and ended up riding that all the way through my summers in college.
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So I emphasize with your life as well, because I did many of the same things.
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I bring that all up because I think we are all parented in a certain way.
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In my case, my parents were strict Catholics.
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They had a way that they wanted us to act, they had a way that they wanted us to perform, and I would say in some ways they were overbearing.
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about the perfectionism that they expected out of us.
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And I didn t grow up with much of a value learning ability.
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And I went right from that to going into the military, which doesn t really foster that either.
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And so for me, it was a huge challenge when I finally had kids to forcefully acknowledge when I started out that I was parenting in the same way that my
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parents had parented me and it took a really conscious and dedicated effort to lean a different way because what I came to the conclusion of is that I would rather have my kids make mistakes when they re young and they can learn from them than doing it as I had done when I was an adult.
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Can you provide some practical tips for parents who might be listening
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on how they themselves, regardless of the background they grew up in, can create a value creation learning environment at their home as well?
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Yeah, well for sure, we give lots of tips on that in the book, Value Creation Kid.
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The gravy stack method, this really simple thing to apply that seems to be uncovering a lot of capacity for parents because the kids are doing more of their job for the family,
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But first be intentional about it and think about, which for sure, I think a lot of parents do, but they re not super intentional about the journey to get there, but be intentional about what do you want your high school senior, your child to look like when they launch into adulthood?
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And for me, I think it s important that they re self-reliant.
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They want to create value in the world.
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They can think critically.
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They re financially competent.
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And they do know that the best way is to go forth and create value in the world.
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So whatever that looks like, how can you be more intentional all the way through?
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So first, talking about value creation in the three buckets, emotional, spiritual, and material, and then house rules.
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So what s your job for the family that changes as you get older as a child?
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How do you pick up expenses over time?
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You need to learn to manage money and all that.
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At what point do you start picking up expenses like going out to movies or dinners with friends, other outings, etc. ?
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One parent even has it at a certain age, they cover cavities if they can t learn to eat better and brush their teeth.
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And then that could be an issue.
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And then third, how do we give them an opportunity to earn extra money so they can actually manage all that?
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And then third is financial competency.
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So what are the basics of financial literacy?
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And then how are we helping them apply that to be financially competent?
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So they re just making way better money choices.
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And then fourth, wildly important, healthy struggles.
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How are we designing healthy struggles for children so that they can handle at any point in time, it can t be too big of a step, but it just marches them down that road very intentionally to being this value creating amazing adult as they launch out of high school, whether they go to college or not.
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Thinking about that gravy stack method and the four ways of running at it, that s a great framework for every family to incorporate this value creation concept in the overall principles.
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So that s where I would start is just being super intentional there.
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And most parents say, well, we do pieces up, but we just have never tied it together.
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I believe that in organizations, we make the assumption that employees connect the dots to value that needs to be created, but they don t.
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And I think kids have an even harder time connecting the dots and we assume that they do.
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So we explain a concept.
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to an adult or a child and they don t get it right away.
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We can t shrug our shoulders and say they don t understand it.
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If it took us 20 or 30 or 40 years to understand it, let s at least give them 20 or 30 or 40 minutes to work through it.
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It s important that in the family, we create an environment where they can discover their value creation superpowers over time.
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They can cultivate all that stuff.
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not just read this book, take this class, any motivational nudge most of the time won t stick.
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It has to be a basic sort of set of rules of engagement for the family around how we individually and collectively create value.
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Well, thank you for sharing that.
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And earlier you talked about the gravy stack.
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I thought it was important to talk about a couple more of the concepts from the book.
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Can you elaborate on what you call home gigs for kids and why they re valuable for their development?
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Absolutely.
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So their job for the family, which will encompass more and more things that they don t get paid for.
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This is just what you do.
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It s part of it.
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Now, as we provide opportunities for them to earn extra money, we have action gigs and brain gigs.
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And the action gigs would be, let s say it s outside your job for the family.
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You re going to wash the car and we re going to pay you an amount of money.
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That s equivalent to what we get it done for down the street.
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We don t want to overdo it, but we need to teach a good lesson here around the fair value of what you re actually doing.
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And so there s an action gig.
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They re using their labor.
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They re getting it done.
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A brain gig would be learn these principles around financial literacy and go apply it so you can show competency in it.
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And they can get paid for doing that too.
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So you can set up gigs, these home gigs that are labor-based and brain-based and application along with that, so they can earn extra money.
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And it s important, I think for sure, for kids to have an opportunity to earn extra money so they can learn how to manage it.
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Some families would say, well, we never pay.
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They should just do this.
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That s their job for the family.
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Well,
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If we re getting ready for adulthood and they haven t had any experience managing money, we re not setting them up for success.
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And too many kids are going into that new phase called the emerging adult phase.
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Zero to 18, they re a kid.
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And then 18 to 36, they re emerging adults.
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And then they come out in their late thirties as an actual adult that s self-reliant.
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We want them to be there at 18.
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Like you and I were Sean.
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Yeah.
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Well, one of the other concepts you talk about is shutting down the bank of mom and dad.
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And for me, in some ways, this is a concept I resonate with, but for me personally, it was never a thing because, uh, I didn t have an option.
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I don t ever remember from the time I was in fifth grade throughout the entire time I was raising my kids that I ever went back to my parents for money, not for college, not for a car, not for rent, not for anything.
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And I have people who come to me and say, well, how did you do it?
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And I just said, well, when you don t have that option, you have to figure it out.
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So I just always figured it out and I always found ways that I could make enough money to get through those situations.
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But I know a lot of people rely on the bank of mom and dad and how can parents approach this with the intention of empowering their children to manage money effectively by shutting down that bank of mom and dad.
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Well, you lay out the ground rules between now and the time you launch into adulthood.
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These are the steps that we re going to go through, and these are the expenses you re going to be picking up, more and more of them as you get older.
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And these are the ones that we re going to be dropping along the way, and we re setting them up to actually be able to do it.
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And I actually think most low-income and probably the majority of middle-income families
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They don t have a lot of extra money, so there really isn t a bank of mom or dad.
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That s the reality.
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That s where you and I grew up.
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We didn t have that.
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If we wanted it, we went and got it for ourselves, which is so unbelievably healthy.
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It s great.
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But when you get upper middle class and above, the easy button is just, yeah, here, get this, get whatever iPhone you want, and here s money for going out tonight.
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It s like this easy button where we re teaching the worst lesson in a lot of ways when it comes to money.
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that you don t have to think about it or earn it.
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You don t have to learn how to manage it.
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It ll just always be here.
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So even in super wealthy families, I think this is wildly helpful to get them to understand all this stuff.
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So they don t end up in a situation where the first generation earns it and the second generation enjoys it and the third generation destroys it.
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As I ve heard people say lately, why is it that by the third generation, generational wealth is lost?
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Well, we should be setting them up to be able to handle that stuff all the way through.
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But for most families, I don t think there is a bank of mom or dad.
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There s huge advantages in coming from a low income family because it encourages you to learn how to hustle in a lot of ways.
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Like I did.
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Yeah.
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It s something that I love hearing Gary V talk about because there is the power of the hustle and getting you from point A to point B and nothing ever beats hard work and dedication.
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Well, Lee, I had two final questions I wanted to ask you, and they re a little bit off the topic we ve been discussing.
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One is, I know a lot of people have a desire at some point to write a book.
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What advice would you give an aspiring author looking to write an impactful book like you have done?
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Yeah, first would be, how do you want the book to move the needle?
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What difference in a positive value creating way do you want to make in the world?
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And then you write from that perspective.
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My first book, Your Most Important Number, I just wanted something that was more comprehensive to get the concept out there in a bigger way.
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And boy, has this really worked globally.
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It s fantastic for me.
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So I accomplished my goal and it seems to be accelerating.
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And I organized all my thoughts that way went through without too much detail.
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What are the chapter titles?
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And then I wrote the first paragraph of each chapter to make sure everything flowed all the way through.
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And the last chapter is actually a DIY chapter in case people want to do it on their own and it s totally doable.
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And then I would modify that.
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Then I wrote the subtitles to the chapters and then I just started writing and I was doing research and working with different clients.
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I spent about a year on that one.
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Second book, same thing.
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This is where we want to move the needle.
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And I did all the same work just to spend a lot more time on it with my co-author.
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And we wrote that book in four months, getting it done.
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But organizing thoughts that way, where do we want to move the needle?
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Book has to stand alone and really create the value in the world.
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So that s my best advice.
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It s not about being an author.
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It s about a tool
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to accelerate the value that you re trying to create.
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And speaking about tools and other initiatives to creating value, looking ahead, and you ve hinted at a few of them today, what projects are you excited about in the future and how do they align with your own value creation desires and making a meaningful difference in the world?
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Yeah, I m excited about the execute CEO mastermind groups that we re building.
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I ve got a number of groups that I lead.
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I have certified chairs that are leading their own groups.
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We limit it to eight.
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Everybody s in high growth mode.
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We apply this methodology and the results have been fantastic.
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And my goal here, and I m going to start the first one in Q4 of this year is to have
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Ideally, at least half, but preferably all of them.
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But every member of these groups has their own junior execute CEO mastermind group where we pick six to eight high school kids that are coming out of high school with traction with a business.
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And then they re mentoring those.
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And so it s really spreading value creation in a much bigger way.
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So I could see a point in time where there s a thousand groups of eight members.
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And then each of those members has their own junior group or maybe two.
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That s a way to really get it to go.
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So on the organizational value creation side, that s where I m making the fastest moves and it s super exciting.
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And then K-12 education.
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How do we get out of this rut of money and memorization is somehow education.
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I want to change the whole purpose to creating value in the world.
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And I want to get a curriculum fully aligned to where it s all about that.
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It doesn t matter where you get the education, whether you went to college or you didn t, it really doesn t matter.
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You can get education just about anywhere.
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Um, but it s all through the lens of creating value.
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So there s a number of nonprofits that I m involved with that impact the conditions for K-12 students to learn.
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And so those are the two things that I m working on and they re fully aligned with my purpose of pushing value creation in the world.
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Okay.
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Well, thank you, Lee.
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And lastly, if someone wanted to learn more about you and what you re up to, what is the best way for them to do that?
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Yeah.
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My current business is called execute to win.
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So you can go to etw.com and you can learn all about this stuff.
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You can pick up the books there.
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You can learn about the mastermind groups.
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You can learn about how we help organizations directly implement this to create more value and material to do it yourself.
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Malie, thank you so much for joining us today.
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It was such a pleasure to have you on.
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Yeah, John, it was great to be here.
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Thank you so much.
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I thoroughly enjoyed that interview with Lee Benson and all that we had to talk about around the topic of value creation.
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And I wanted to thank Lee and Bo Hawkins for the honor and privilege of having Lee appear on today s show.
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Links to all things Lee Benson will be in the show note at passionstruck.com.
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Please use our website links if you purchase any of the books from the guests that we feature here on the show.
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If you want to catch the videos, you need to go and subscribe to our YouTube channels at both John R. Miles and Passionstruck Clips.
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Please consider supporting those who support the show and make it possible.
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You can go sign up for my work-related newsletter, Work Intentionally on LinkedIn.
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You can find me on all the social platforms where I post daily at John R. Miles, and you can sign up for my personal development newsletter, Live Intentionally at passionstruck.com.
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You re about to hear a preview of the PassionStark podcast interview that I did with retired astronaut Mike Massimino.
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From growing up as a working-class kid with a dream as vast as the cosmos, to strapping himself into a NASA space shuttle and orbiting our beautiful planet, Mike has experienced a journey that is nothing short of extraordinary.
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In our interview, we discuss Mike s new book, Moonshot, which is not just a memoir, it s a roadmap for success.
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Packed with wit, wisdom, and the unique perspective
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the man who s seen our world from a viewpoint that very few will.
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There s a chapter in the book that talks about, it s called Be Amazed.
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Looking at our planet from space, I thought I was looking into absolute paradise.
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And you can t imagine any place being more beautiful than our planet, our home.
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As far as us mattering, I think we matter a lot because we got a really cool place to live.
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I believe that there is life other places.
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I don t think we ve encountered it yet, but I think we re going to find each other at some point.
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But I would be shocked if wherever they are, they have a place as beautiful as our planet.
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And I think we are in a very unique spot.
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It s a complete and utter paradise that we re living in.
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I think you see its true beauty from space.
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And maybe that s what people define as the overview effect.
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The fee for this show is that you share it with family or friends when you find something useful or interesting.
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If you know someone who can unlock the power of value creation, then definitely share this episode with Lee Benson with them.
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The greatest compliment that you can give the show is to share it with those that you love and care about.
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In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so that you can live what you listen.
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Until next time, go out there and become passion struck.