Get your seat belts on. You're about to go for a ride. Mike Richardson joins me on the podcast today. And I am excited to share him with you because Mike is an energy producing machine and just listening to him creates this energetic force field in you if you allow it to get into you. So hey, I'm excited. You're here. Enjoy this episode with Mike.
Mike Richardson, welcome to the advisory board Insider PodCast. I'm really glad you're yay.
Yeah, it's good to be it's on. Thanks for having me.
Yeah. So let's start exactly with where you are right now. Tell me exactly where you are.
I am in a wine district in Southern California called Temecula Valley. We're sort of in the triangulation between Los Angeles, San Diego and Palm Springs lived here for 23 years, Tom, and we love it.
Lovely. So are you in your you're in your house? It sounds like is that where you are?
I am in my home office was one of the things that really attracted us about this particular house. We're on the top of a hill, we have a beautiful view. And I have a lovely home office. So I'm happy here.
I love home offices. I'm in my home office within the studio part of my home office. So I love that. So let's begin with your morning drink of choice, which seems like a strange place to start. But I'm always intrigued by the drink of choice. So what do you drink in the morning?
Well, in the morning, I would drink a cup of coffee or several. I heard your previous podcast where you were talking about a particular brand of coffee and a particular kind of cup with a particular kind of, you know, additive in it. That's not me at all.
Okay, so you're you're willing to take whatever comes out of the coffee,
whatever my wife has going on now. You sort of slipped in a word that you said in the morning, right? Yes, it's in the afternoon. We're recording this in the afternoon. So typically, late morning, I switched to tea. Yes, but I just told you that I live in a wine district. And so especially on a Friday, which it is today, Tom, it will not be too long. Before hopefully, I am heading to a local winery. This is one of my favorites called leonesse. It's just a couple of miles away. There are white, there are 50 wineries around us here in Temecula Valley. We love it. And I hope to be doing that in a couple of hours tall.
Lovely. All right. So let's begin though if if your morning drink is coffee and you don't care what it's in, you don't care what kind it is. Do you like put cream and sugar in there? Is it just milk milk coffee? Okay. Yeah. All right. So no particular brewing style. There's no special thing just as long as it's a you've got an input device to take it down the hat?
Yes. Yes. Yeah. So it's a caffeine delivery system. That's what it is.
Yeah. All right. So take me back and tell me exactly how you started your day, or what's like the average day look like for you first thing this morning, what's your day look like?
I am one of those crazy individuals, Tom, who is a part of what is sometimes called the 4am. Club. Oh, I get up at 4am Every day, including the weekends. And I just love that early morning time between say four and six or seven. Before the email start to come in before I'm on video, call after video call after video call. And so it's my way to get everything done that I want to get done creatively. From a from a project point of view before the day really starts so that I can feel that I've gone into my day ahead of the curve and not chasing my day, you know, behind the curve all day long. So that's that's what I do. I've done that for probably 20 years now. And it's clearly not for everybody. Many people my wife included, think you are you're completely crazy. You are not normal. Right? You and I What is your what is wrong with you? But I love it.
So so the coffee comes after you've been at it for a couple of hours. Oh, no, no, no, no, no, the
coffee comes at 401 Got it. Okay. I have a one minute commute via the coffee machine. I feel that you sit
down at your desk and go to work, sit down at my desk and go to work. So interesting. All right. So thank you for that. So I want to start maybe having started there and understanding your morning routine and that you're you're sort of a a sort of
unconsciously.
You're an uncomplicated coffee drinker. So I'm gonna go back, I need you to tell me a story as we start today about finding Hazel wood. So wood, and please start with that story.
You have really done research, I didn't mention that to you. So, you know, my, my, my work, Tom is all around the topic of agility and whatnot, which I've been doing now for 20 years, you know, since being independent and 20 years before that in my corporate life. And then I went independent into my portfolio life 20 years ago. And I settled on the concept of agility. And I really got hold of this idea of the nature of a journey, what is a journey? How does a journey unfold? And most people think about a journey sort of macro scopic Lee. And, and of course, you need to do that we're here. We want to be there. How do we get there, but I, time after time, after time after time had had realized, yes. And part of the secret is to think about a journey microscopically, how does it unfold? And then like, when was it back in 2001, I think it was the summer of 2001, or possibly 2000. So right at the start, my wife and I were living here in the USA and in Southern California. And we get invited back to a wedding in a little village in the center of England called Hazelwood. And, you know, you get the invitation kind of nine months prior, and we start to talk about flights, hotels, cars, kids currencies, you name it, we talk about it. And we gradually put together what what became a four week vacation back in the UK because we haven't been back in a while taking in this wedding and Hazelwood kind of halfway through. And I have all kinds of navigational stories that I could tell you, Tom, we just don't have time, right? Because Because my wife will admit that she is navigationally challenged. And of course back in 2000 2001. This is before GPS and sat nav, and Mapquest and all that good stuff. But lo and behold, on this particular time, we arrive in the center of Hazelwood right on time, four o'clock on the Friday for those sort of rendezvous dinner, before the wedding on Saturday. We're right on time in the center, Hazelwood. And we arrived at the sort of crossroads, the central crossroads of this little English village. And my wife had like stuck a sticker on the map saying Hazel was here kind of thing. And I turned to her and I say, so where's the hotel bed? And she says, Give me a break. You know, I got us to the center of Hazelwood in the middle of nowhere, you know, let's drive this way. And if we don't find it, let's come back and drive that way. And I'm sure we'll find that big resort hotel with a hunk and great big golf course behind it. Right, whatever. So we drive this way. We don't find it. We drive that way. We don't find it. And there's a lady walking down the country lane, you know, high hedges. And I pull over and I say excuse me, we're looking for the Hazelwood Castle, Hazelwood Manor hotel, something like that. The invitations in the trunk. Can you tell us where that is, please? And she says, No, that doesn't ring a bell. So I said, Well, okay, maybe I got the name wrong. But where's the big resort hotel around here? I'm sure that'll be it. She says nope. There's nothing like that. Around here. Oh, so I get the invitation out of the trunk. And it says the Hazelwood Castle Hotel Hayes wood, but there's no telephone number. That's all it says. And I say to my wife, you know when you stuck that
sticker on the map, yeah. How did you determine this is the right Hazel wood.
And bless her. We're still very happily married. Good. She said, Well, I turned to the index of the map. I looked up Hazel wood. There was only one entry and this is it. So I'm thinking, Oh, my Goodness me. How many Hazel Woods could there be? In the UK? One level of resolution below the resolution of this map? It could be anywhere. Fortunately, I get a I get a signal on my cell phone. I get through to Director inquiries. I say Look, all I know is Hazelwood. Castle, hotel Hazel, which he says putting you through. So next thing you know, I'm talking to the receptionist of the Hazelwood Castle Hotel Hazel, and they say look, I have a funny question for you. She said, I said by the way, I said my name is Richardson. We're coming for a big family wedding this weekend. She said Oh, yes. Yes. We're so excited to have you. So I knew I was talking to the right people. I said, Well, I have a funny question for you. She said, Sure. I said, could you just tell me the biggest city that you're close to? And she said, Oh yes. We're just five minutes east of Leeds where we had been Two hours before, because we had driven south from Scotland. Past leads, right kept going for another 100 120 150 miles. So we turned the car around. We drove two hours back north. I promised her I wouldn't mention it, which I did not Tom for I brought it up.
I am I am completely sorry, I brought it up and I tried to communicate under the radar with your wife about this. I didn't. So So I think it's a it's a powerful story, because I know that it has informed some because you started when I asked you the story you started with how that affects agility? Yeah. And it's about a journey somewhere. So if if you permit me take me back to year 10 or 11 in secondary school. Let's go back to there. Where were you? And what were you thinking?
Well, man, you've really recent, you mean when I was 10 or 11 years old?
No, when you were in year 10 or 11? In secondary school,
okay, so in England, right. In India, that means I made the 10th grade roughly right. Yeah. Which we don't we didn't we don't call it that. England, but that means I would be probably what 1718 years old? Is that? What your maths? 1516. Okay, yeah. So I will be in the final year of what we call secondary school. And I was studying maths, physics, geography. Those were the main core classes that I was doing well, at. I was a, I was what's called a prefect, right? These are those those students who help you know, police if you like the school and make sure everybody's behaving themselves. I was. I was a member of the hovercraft club. So we built little hovercraft, you know, that could carry one person. And we would take them away for the weekend with the metalworking teacher. It was him that did all this on his own time, we would take them away at the weekend and race them at these organized, you know, racing meats, where you'd sort of show up in the grounds of a castle that's got rolling hills and a lake. And they would set up this fantastic course that's, you know, overground and overwater. And it was just a fabulous experience.
So at that point in time, you're building hovercrafts on the weekend, and you're going school and you're being a prefect, what's your, what's your vision of your future? What what's the future that you have? Going?
Oh, that's interesting, you know, because, you know, like many people, I'm sure I came from very ordinary, a very ordinary background, my father was a policeman, my mother was a secretary in the local hospital, very, very, very hardworking parents, who, for whom, of course, we were the first generation of kids that had the possibility to go to university. And they promised I was, I'm one of three boys on the youngest. They promised us all, just you find your way to get to university, and we will figure it out. And they did, of course, back in those days, you know, there were grants and things available. So, you know, I didn't really have a clear vision, apart from the fact that I knew I wanted to go to university. And I was increasingly getting clear that geology, geography, physics and maths were my natural inclination. And as I did my research, you know, over the following two or three years, thinking about which universities and how I might what subjects I might major and I settled on geophysics, which is really the combination of geology, physics and maths. And so I had a vision at that point, that I would probably be an engineer of some description, and that I would probably pursue a technical career for most of my life. And, and I was beginning to think about, you know, back in the 80s, of course, you know, could I perhaps join the international staff of one of the big oil majors and, and have an international career?
So how do you go from that evolving vision to standing on a Shell Oil, oil and gas rig out in the middle of the ocean somewhere? How do you how do you? How do you get there, so give me a sense of how you get to the shell. Because it seems to me from researching a little bit about you that this standing on an oil and gas rig out in the middle of the ocean has has deeply influenced how you think about agility?
Yes. Oh my gosh, this is a wonderful conversation. So, so I went to, I went to university, I managed to get there. And I started doing geophysics and I started to do very well. I ended up you know, being one of those overachievers that came top of his class kind of thing, it wasn't a big, it wasn't a big class. But I came top of the class and I got involved. I was very passionate about industry and I got involved with some industrial society kinds of things, and took on some sort of leadership roles in those in those, you know, on campus societies and things and, and I guess that just helped me get noticed when I started applying to the oil majors, I got recruited by Shell to join their international staff. So age, age 20, I went abroad and became an expatriate in Holland, to do the six month training camp boot camp kind of experience, after which shell had a fantastic graduate training program where they then put you out in the field for two years. And in my case, I was in the upstream part of the engineering process. And so I went out on drilling rigs, for two years week on week off as one of the two company personnel on site. The number one person is called the tool pusher. Isn't that great language number two person is called the petroleum engineer. That's what I was okay. And I did I did about 18 months onshore in Holland, drilling for oil and gas, all over the place. Sometimes in the in the harbor, sometimes of Rotterdam, sometimes off the off the just off the beach and shaving and sometimes down in in some of the historical oil and gas areas, like the groaning and gas field that used to be the biggest gas field in the world, and the schoenebeck oil field, and then I did six months offshore, helicopter helicopter back. And whether you're onshore or offshore, when you go out for your week on you are on 24/7 You sleep if and when you can, wow. And it was just a phenomenal experience. And I realized, you know, late 20 years later, 40 years later, I realized that that's where I first cut my teeth with being agile, and I didn't use the word back then I didn't understand the concept fully back then. But I realize that's where I learned to be agile, and it served me well, you know, for 40 years thereafter.
So in in that in that lesson, even though you didn't really understand it till later the connection to Agile what was the what was the thing you really got out of being on the rigs? Like being out for like, What, you don't have to go deeply into it, but just yeah, what's the what's the thing that that's brought? Yeah, over these years from that platform experience?
Yeah. So you know, when you're out offshore, a week on week off there's there's a there's there's two company personnel on site, there's contractor personnel on site. And then you've got, you know, probably 40 5060 people in total people that are called roughnecks, and restaurants, you've all seen the movie, the movie Deepwater Horizon, you can all picture that in your mind. And course, you know, you're doing really heavy engineering, you're landing all kinds of equipment and heavy duty stuff off of supply boats that are you know, rising and falling in the in the ocean. You're working 24/7 It doesn't matter, the time of day, it doesn't matter that by and large, it doesn't matter the weather, there would be times that I would be stood, you know, on us on the back of a cement, cement truck kind of installation, pumping cement like crazy down a whole bunch of pipes going down into the hole, counting this and counting that in the middle of the night with horizontal snow driving in my face really. And and and you just know that that at any moment, anything can change, the weather can change, something can break go wrong, and you just have to be ready and and what I what I realized I learned Tom is the difference between organized chaos and disorganized chaos. And how do you stay in you know 5% 10% 15% in the green zone of organized chaos, not not the needle moving back over to 5% 10% 15% in the red zone of disorganized chaos because that difference at the extreme can be the difference between life and death, rather the extreme and extreme on your average day. No, it's not devastating life and death, it's the difference between staying on schedule, staying on budget, staying safe, nobody getting hurt, you know, losing losing losing a farm or something. But on a on a bad day. It's the Gulf. It's the Deepwater Horizon, you know, Gulf oil spill BP scenario that can play out before your eyes if you're not careful. And in that extreme environment, you typically don't get any second chances, right? Things can go really bad, really big, really fast. And so you sort of have to become conditioned and acclimatized to? How do I stay in the green zone of organized chaos? How do I have luck on my side? Not working against me? And, and who do I need to be as a leadership presents, to to to make sure to assure that everything stays safe, and on track and on time and on budget, and I just took, I just took those experiences, that real world experience I took into the business world, and then I took it into the advisory world. And it has just served me well ever since.
Yeah, that's, that's so cool. And to me, it seems like it's so profound, because it's such at such a young, early age, right? And you're, you're out getting all of this, this powerful perspective on the world, and you're like a sponge in a way, and yet you're working your butt off. And somewhere in there, these lessons get lodged into the system, they just get Yeah,
yeah. And I developed deep, deep deep reserves, of course of personal resilience. Of course, if, you know, there'll be times where, you know, I just come through my second night of no sleep. And of course, you know, if I had to go into a third night of no sleep, then that would be downright dangerous. And so I would get relieved, they would fly out a relief petroleum engineer, and give me you know, 12 hours off or something, but typically, not typically, you're on for the seven days, and you can handle it. But occasionally, you know, when something would happen, it's just getting dangerous. And so you'll get relieved for, you know, a period of time to let you catch up. But you develop these deep reserves of resilience, and you know, that you have to be simultaneously working short term, medium term, long term. And, and strategically and tactically all at the same time, you've got to be, you know, whatever operation we're running right now. And for the next two or three hours, it has to go right, it has to go well, and I need to be all over it. And I've got to be thinking about okay, great. And so we should be done with this by about 6am. That means I need the supply boat here by about 9am. I can't have the supply boat here too early, because there's no space to put anything until, until we've run all this stuff down hole. There's no space. I can't have the supply boat here too early. I can't have the supply boat here too late. Because otherwise I'm sitting around for six hours twiddling my thumbs, what's happening with the weather? And, and okay, let's suppose that that goes well, tomorrow, the day after that, what's happening the day after that? What's happening? And oh, three weeks from now, we think we're going to be done here. And we're going to relocate the rig somewhere else and start again, what am I going to get lined up for all of that. So you're constantly working for us in the present backwards in the future strategically and tactically all at the same time. And sometimes the smallest thing can bite you in the rear. Yeah. And all of a sudden, in lose once Tom that was once that I made a mistake in my estimation of how much particular material I had and how long it would last at the rate we were using it. And something was happening that we hadn't quite clued into. And we were using more of it than we realized. And we ran out. And it was a safety critical item. So I had to make the phone call in the middle of the night. There's always a duty person, you know, head office on duty, you wake them up, they're sleeping, but you wake them up, they take the call. And I had to explain that we'd run out and there was only one One recommendation that I could make, and that was that we needed to shut the rig down for 12 hours and wait for the next supply vote. And the duty the duty person agreed with me that there was no other option. It was the prudent thing to do. And I just want to really hard and you can you can, you can feel it in me right now I just swallow really hard because that really hurt my pride. There were very few people that got through I was on I was on drilling rigs onshore and offshore for 300 days and nights. There are there are there are very few people that get through that, like squeaky clean, right? You know, something's gonna happen. You got to swallow hard, you take it on the chin, and you learn and grow. And you realize, okay, you fell short there. Now, this is a tough, this is a tough, challenging job. You fell short there? What are you going to do to make sure that doesn't happen again. And that was the rule. That was what they said to us. When they sent us out there. They said, Look, within the rails of safety, and, you know, outside of the rails of gross misconduct, forget about it, but inside the rails of safety, and all of that good stuff. You can make any mistake once. Just don't make it twice.
Right? Right. Yeah, that's great. So fast forward, you, you leave that you get your MBA, and then you get back into business. And at a certain point in time you become the CEO of an aerospace company, as I understand it, so. So all this experience on the rigs, and then you get some more education, and you do a little bit more work. And now you're sitting in front, I think it was called bowthorpe is the name I read somewhere, or spirit. And it's a 500 million pound a year business. And what's what's similar to the rigs? And what's different, and how do you enter this role as a CEO now, this is the first CEO role you've had.
Yeah, so I did quit. I quit shale after five years, because I realized I wasn't really cut out. For a technical career. I love being in the field for two years, I was really cut out for that. But then after that, they bring you into the office and you become an analyst supporting other people in the field. And I thought, you know, that's not really me. So I decided to do the classic thing in the 80s. And I quit and I went and funded myself through a two year full time MBA. And I discovered my passion for leadership and my passion for industry. A lot of my colleagues went off and did you know, consulting with the big firms, or got into private equity or venture capital and I just thought a City of London I don't want to do that, I want to go into leadership and British industry and I looked at the automotive industry and I looked at a few others and then I got offered a job by bowthorpe. Or no, actually by Doughty, first of all, as in the Midlands in Wolverhampton and in what's called the Black Country of the UK, because it's so industrial, I got offered a job as a program manager of an aerospace, a complex aerospace project. And then I became a Product Support Manager, then a commercial manager, and then a sales and marketing VP. And then I and I'm dealing with Boeing and Airbus and British Airways, and all these people. And then I got headhunted away to become a managing director, a CEO of a 5 million pound subsidiary of this 500 million pound conglomerate. In other words, in other words, they had 100 companies, like the one they recruited me to run, became, I became the managing director of this oldy worldy conglomerate called both or around one of their subsidiary companies. And then we merged it with another one across the street. So I was running a bigger one. And then what happened is a the current CEO, retired, new, a new CEO, contemporary CEO, who was British, but he'd spent a number of years in the States came on board, he wanted to take the thing to a whole new level. So we rebranded ourselves from both ought to Spirent. And I got promoted to run the aerospace division. And this is back now I got I got promoted in 1997. I think it was to run the aerospace division, and I ended up and I was I had a, I had a combination of really high tech, aerospace hardware and software companies and was serving Boeing, Airbus, British Airways, American united, you know, military militaries as well. So it was really sort of blue chip stuff, and then we ended up making Three acquisitions here in North America, one in Canada and two in the USA. And that's what, that's what brought the sort of center of gravity of my operation over here. I was coming here every other week at one point. And so, in 1999, one thing led to another as a longer story, but we decided to relocate here and came over here on a four year work permit, initially, at least.
So what did that because, you know, we heard about you're on the, you know, with Shell, you learned some really incredible things here. What were the big lessons from running Spirent? is how you say, Spirent? And then the evolution to the whole aerospace division. What were the big lessons you got from that time?
Yeah. So So yeah, so I ran the aerospace division of SPIRE it and spiral was a public company, it became a it became a darling have the city in the 90 790-899-2000, run up, you know, of the net, we were NASDAQ listed as well. And our price earnings ratio was off the charts. And there were some other big divisions and then the the aerospace division. And so I lived in this, this vise, this pressure cooker, between needing to be very entrepreneurial, with high tech, aerospace hardware and software, businesses and integrated systems that we put together. We back we actually were in the business of crash protected recorders, black boxes, and, and non crash protected recorders called Quick Access recorders, that would record the whole flight. And we would then put that through a system called fo qua fo QA, flight operations, quality assurance, really high tech stuff. We also did air data, computers, Air Data, test equipment, and we did engine instrument displays and a really, really high tech stuff that you know, has to meet, you know, the top F F a, you know, and CA certification requirements. So I'm doing all this entrepreneurial stuff, at the same time, as having to provide the corporation, you know, a predictable share price sensitive performance, right. And of course, those two things are almost the opposites of each other. Entrepreneurship is not predictable. Right? And yet, I had to be predictable. So that was a really interesting sort of place that I had to live. And what I learned about that was, it's all about innovation. It's all about how do you facilitate the flow of innovation? How do you have the right culture for innovation? How do you have the right productivity for innovation? How do you mobilize a team for innovation? How do you have the agility for innovation? Because you know, one thing about innovation, it will not be right first time, right? You will fail. And, and it's all about Yeah, but how can you iterate and iterate and iterate and eventually succeed. And so that's really what I learned. That's, that's
so cool. And it's really cool to watch, you know, a story evolved from, you know, building a hovercraft to standing on a Shell oil platform, dealing with just the intensity of that, moving through and becoming a CEO or managing director, and then especially in a publicly traded company with innovation plus accountability, and the intensity of that. So eventually, you leave that and you're in the life you're in now, which what you call a portfolio business, and you're helping other people to be agile to to respond to this, this history of yours. So give me a sense of the common thread because agility is part of that. But there's this common thread because you you consult you coach, you advise you, you lead, you facilitate you do all the written books. Give me a sense of the thread that that has come through this whole journey to get you to where you are now.
Well, that's the key word journey, that that, you know, we when you asked me earlier about the Hazelwood story there or what I what I came to call the wrong the Hazelwood story, because we ended up in the wrong Hazelwood. I use that that story now to reveal to people that you can get 99 out of 100 things right, you can get 999 or 1000 things right. Oftentimes, it's the one question, the one thought, the one decision, the one action that you didn't do, that derailed the whole thing and because I was in the field of crash recorders, You know, I was very intimate with aircraft accidents and all of that. And so I tell stories of aircraft accidents and how, unfortunately, you know, even today, you know, a very large percentage of aircraft accidents are pilot error, our crew crew error, because we weren't thinking about something the right way. We weren't questioning it the right way. We weren't deciding the right way. We weren't acting the right way. And what I realized, as I you know, that the whole field of agility has just been an exploding universe over the last 20 years. It's just like bewildering everybody now is in the agility, business, everybody. And so I was sort of pondering, you know, where my instincts took me in terms of how to sort of cut through the complexity and the hype. And I ended up framing up this idea that the journey unfolds in how you Lincoln accumulate individual thoughts, questions, decisions and actions macroscopically and microscopically, and and if there are any missing, you can get yourself into the wrong Hazelwood or an aircraft accident or BP Gulf oil spill really fast, really big with few second chances. And I started to frame that up, and I distilled it down to what I call conversation flow to cash flow, see, to see conversation flow to cash flow and, and that sort of accumulation of how you you link and accumulate thoughts, questions, decisions and actions. That's what I mean by conversation flow. And, and people will say what you mean, we just sit around and talk? And I say, Well, no, of course not. Notice that actions are a part of conversation. Actions are a conversation with reality. If only you will bring reality into the conversation by taking real actions, agility is a contact sport, you have to contact reality. Because until you do, you've learned nothing. Nothing. It's all theory, right? You think you've learned something. But the reality is until you contact reality, you put a real thing in front of real people who really use it and give you real feedback about what they really like, and what they really don't like until that point, relatively speaking, you know, nothing. So I frame an action as a part of the conversation. And and what I like to say to people is the trajectory of your cash flow follows the trajectory of your conversation flow. Cash is not king anymore. Conversation, flow is king. And cash flow is a way of keeping score. And so So conversation flow became, and C, the C conversation flow to cashflow became the kind of organizing principle of everything that I do, Tom, whether I'm facilitating or coaching or speaking or writing, or I'm running peer forums, or I'm involved with advisory boards, as a, as an advisory board member or an advisory board chair, whether I am facilitating a strategic retreat, working with the CEO and the C suite and the in the team, what I'm always doing in some way, shape or form is helping them drive an inflection point in the trajectory of their conversation flow. So that their their cash flow can also inflect and follow it. Yeah, that's,
that's so that's really a such a, an interesting way of looking at it. So conversation Well, given that the theme of this, this podcast is advisory boards, conversation flow, to me is a perfect connection point to that. Right. And so give me a sense of your experience, leveraging, you know, that kind of conversation flow that helps to support the chaotic world we're living in and the ability to be agile, give me a sense of how advisory boards have really been a part of shaping and oh, the the role you play the facilitation you do the leadership you give how has how the advisory boards been a part of that?
Exactly. So, you know, the key is, how do you have a decent radar scope, for your business, for your enterprise for your organization? And, you know, the smallest weakest signal out there on the fringe of your radar scope, can be a freight train coming in your direction, and it's going to be here bigger, faster sooner than your worst nightmare if you're not careful. So how do you as a business as a leader, as an enterprise, as an organization, have enough conversation flow, about your radar scope, not just the stuff that's front and center? It's right in front of you. It's clear An obvious, right, it's a clear and present danger, or a clear and present opportunity, but the unclear and unpleasant weak signals on the fringe, because some of those are going to be here before you expect, or at least that, that that's the only safe assumption. Now the challenge is that that can be overwhelming. Right? Well, how do I know what to talk about what not to talk about? Well, that's part of the process, right. And that's why having external eyes and ears, and external input is so crucial. And whether it is a an advisory board for your business, or your enterprise, or your organization, or it's a peer Advisory Board, which is a diverse collection of CEOs and executives from diverse industries and diverse businesses, or being great radar scopes for each other. It's all about improving your radar scope, so that you can be more confident that with a little bit of luck, you can be future proofed. I mean, really, that's what we're talking about, Tom, we're really talking about how well future proofed? Is your business is your leadership, and frankly, therefore, is your career. How well future proofed in it, is it and how well are you diversifying the input that you are getting to your radar scope, so that you can sleep easy, but with a bit of luck, you're going to be okay, in fact, you're not only going to be okay, you're not only going to survive, you're going to thrive because you've got the agility to thrive in a disruptive future, not the fragile allottee to be a threat by disruptive future. And so that's why I became so passionate about peer advisory boards and all the work I've done there. And why I became so passionate about advisory boards, as distinct from governance boards. I've been on both. And we you know, for me, an advisory board is a more agile thing that can really help improve your radar scope.
So you've talked about both of those, and you're involved in both of those. Is there? Is it a peer versus formal advisory group? Or is it a combination of both? What What's your how have you seen that? Because you've been deeply involved in both sides?
Yeah, I like to talk about advisory advantage, which can lead into an agility advantage. And what I mean by an advisory advantage is, are you getting the right combinations of external experienced diverse advisory input? In some combination, often, perhaps, you have an advisory board, for your business, your enterprise, your organization, as a CEO, and perhaps you are also a member of an external peer advisory board to complement that process. And so there isn't a one size fits all answer, of course, but the question is the same. How well are you leveraging developing, evolving and advisory advantage in some way, shape, or form through some combination of those approaches, of course, you might also be using external consultants and coaches and facilitators and all that kind of stuff. But what I'm seeing Tom is, as the pace of turbulent, disruptive, volatile, ambiguous change, only accelerates and by the way, most pundits that I read, will talk in some way shape or form about the exponential age, and the fact that if you think this is fast paced change, you haven't seen anything yet. The convergence of, of artificial intelligence and nano technology and, and, you know, and everything else, 3d printing, and you name it, all of that is just going to converge to an explosive exponential phase of growth that we haven't, you can hardly comprehend and imagine. So if you think this is fast, everybody and overwhelming, right? Watch out. Yeah. And it's my experience. Yeah. Buckle up. Yeah. In my experience. Life is about to change. Yeah. You in that kind of environment. There's absolutely no way you can have all of the in house brainpower and horsepower. Are and diversity of experience and perspective? And, and, and reach? Just it's just not possible. So you have to figure out how are you going to have more advisory input to make up the difference. And in many ways, it's, it's, it's sort of similar to the idea that, you know, I had a corporate career, and now I've got a portfolio career, there's an increasing amount of data that says, more and more and more of the population will have a portfolio career, there are some some data out there that say, I think by 2030, or something 50% of the workforce, will will be portfolio, not corporate. And so we're seeing it in the workforce already. We're seeing it through the great resignation, and the great reshuffle and all this. We're seeing the rise of freelancers or gig workers and an independent consultants and all of this. And so we're having to get used to the idea that I can no longer talk about my employees, right? Because Because an increasing proportion of your human capital are not employees. And I just see the same thing happening at the level of your advisory advantage and increasing proportion of it, necessarily, because you need the diversity, you need the external perspective, is going to have to come from external sources. Yeah,
yeah, that's really good. So as soon as CEO is listening, and she's interested in implementing an advisory board, or an advisory advantage, as you call it, what advice would you give her to prepare for, to build that external, independent eyes and ears to be prepared for what's coming to sort of have Radar Scope future proof herself? What's What's she going to need? What How should she think about this going forward?
Yeah, it's a great, it's a great question. And I've several thoughts on that, Tom, you know, I think here in the USA, in particular, when I like to say is that the advisory boards sector is simultaneously mature and immature, all at the same time. It's mature, in that advisory boards are quite common. They're quite prevalent, actually. That, you know, you see them all over the place in different different shapes and sizes, often, you know, private equity firms venture capital firms, it's one of the first things they will do is put an advisory board together. And what I mean, immature, what I mean is, and I've, you know, I've had a fair amount of experience with this is yeah, often not in the right way for the right reasons, and well run. And, and what I love about, you know, the advisory board center in particular, is the research based, best practice framework of doing advisory boards in the right way that's research based. Because think about it like this, Tom. If we go back to the idea of conversation flow to cash flow, what I like to talk about with people is, well, how do I assess my conversation flow? And what I talk about is QQ see? quantity, quality, and cadence? And then if you go down the hallway, to your CFO, everybody, and you ask your CFO, hey, what do we want our cash flow? Let's start there. What do we want to have our cash flow in some way, shape or form? What your CFO is going to tell you is que que si? quantity, quality and cadence. That's what I want of my cash flow. Well, guess what? That's what you need to have your conversation flow, so that you get that in your cash flow. So what's the quantity quality and cadence of the conversation flow that your advisory board is driving? And if you're not careful, if you have a if you have a, if you have a an advisory board that's immature in terms of it's best practice research based framework, you're talking about a lot of stuff? Absolutely. You're talking about a lot of stuff. But the QA QC of your conversation flow, the quantity quality and cadence isn't where it needs to be. You're over talking about some things and under talking about others, the quality isn't where it needs to be in terms of getting the diversity of input that you need. Some people are dominating, some people are passive. And the cadence, the frequency, the rhythm, the closed loop nature, the follow up the continuity of that conversation flow isn't where it needs to be. And I think what what the advisory board Center has done in particular, is it's brought a research based best practice architecture and toolset to it. The table of how do I establish a mature advisory board that can drive the radar scope of conversation flow with the right quantity, quality and cadence to secure the future of my enterprise, I nothing's guaranteed. But you can, you can sleep a bit more easily, you can have a bit more confidence, you can feel more composed in the face of craziness that you're doing well and future proofing yourself. That's that's the difference for me. So,
back to our fictional CEO, and what what mistakes could she make that you've seen? So it's very easy to, you know, think about, I need an advisory board, I need this, this group of people around me but it's very easy to get kind of stuck. You talked about the advisory board centers capabilities around and sort of best practice and structures and things like that. But it's very easy for a CEO who's trying to get involved in this to kind of screw up. So what have you seen? That's a
great question. So So three things not to do off the top of my head here. And I'll say number one, first and foremost, don't have an advisory board of family and friends. Right? Do not do it. That is an immature advisory board you will not get the QQ see quantity and quality of canes or conversation flow that you need. Number one, number two, do not have a whole bunch of left brainers. And no right brainers don't have a whole bunch of right brainers and no left brainers Do not stack the room with lawyers and accountants. That's you're gonna get a whole bunch of left brain thinking. And not enough right brain thinking, don't stack the room with the creatives and marketing and PR people, because you'll get a whole bunch of right brain thinking and no enough left brain thinking make sure that you are a whole brained advisory board, that you have a good combination of all of it, because that's where the quality of your conversation flow will come from. And then make sure number three, that your your conversation flow is is simultaneously tactical and strategic, long term and short term oriented, it's very easy for your conversation flow to just collapse to being short term tactical. Yes. And, of course, that is where the C team can easily be stuck in its day to day existence anyway. Now, you know that obviously, there are techniques to Agile techniques to prevent that, but, but that is often where they are already. And so make sure that your advisory board isn't just worsening that your advisory board needs to be tackling longer term more strategic things. But of course, those are the more ambiguous things. Those are the harder things to grapple with. And and it's almost like you're reaching up into the ether trying to trying to wrestle with a cloud. It's like, I can't get my head around this. I can't get my arms around this. Well, that's that's that's the process, you've got to start grappling with some of these things that are going to change your future, probably bigger, faster sooner than you think.
Well, and that's that's to me, the place where you just hit that your radar scope is engaged more, especially if you've engaged in dependence on your advisory board. If it's all insiders, they're they're generally stuck in the same scope you are it's the the prevalence of whole brained outsiders independent, unique perspective fit for purpose is is often a way of describing it. They're fit for the purpose of this board that they're sitting
Yeah, with no hidden agenda apart from to give you their very best best input. And you know, exactly, it's all about how do you be as future proofed as you as you possibly can be? And how do you, you know, be out in front? You know, when I talk when I love to study, agile leaders in the real world, I call them I call them everyday agile leaders in the real world. They're experiencing the agility challenge in the real world every day fighter pilots, Special Forces, commercial pilots, professional sports people, petroleum engineers working on offshore drilling rigs. And you know, when you talk to a commercial pilot, they will always tell you be out in front of the plane. You've got to be making sure that you always Keeping your options open, you know, in a commercial airliner you never ever, ever want to run out of options. That doesn't end well. So you got to be out ahead of the plane. How do you get out ahead of the plane, everybody in running your business? And, and really tapping into that, that external perspective, because one of the things that we say everybody in the field of Agile is that the future is already here. It's just not evenly distributed. It's out there on the fringe. Right? Right, the future is already here, it's out there on the fringe, not in your sector, not in your industry. But in some other sector. In some other industry, the future is already here, and it's coming to you very soon, or could be coming to you very soon. So what you have to do, is you have to go future hunting, and to go future hunting, you have to go to the fringe. Right and or bring the fringe to you, you. And when you're when you're bringing external advisors, and chair, people have advisory boards, when you're bringing them into your advisory board. That's what you're doing, you're bringing the fringe to you, so that you can breathe different air. And you can wear different lenses, and you can gain a new perspective that's going to challenge you. And, and you know, you are some of your people. You know, what's that saying? Never Say Never Oh, that'll never that'll never happen that'll never come to our industry, our business really? Okay. You know, that's a very, very, very risky thing. And when a when a when an advisory board is well chaired for that cue, QC, quantity, quality and cadence. Then a good a good advisory board chair, or a good peer advisory board leader will make sure that the conversation the playing field, have the conversation flow remains level. Yeah. And that there's no dark corner of conversation flow, that we're not having a good chair or make sure that no, no, no, we shine a light in there. And we see you know, the elephant in the corner of the room that nobody wants to talk about. And we just at the very least, you know, make sure that we acknowledge it. And we're not going to ignore it. Because it'll come and bite us in the rear if we're not careful. And we just figure out how to make sure that in some way, shape or form. We tackle that over time. You know, one one bite at a time, we're going to tackle that. Because if we don't, it leaves your future at risk. Yeah.
Well, I feel like that's a great place to wrap because like you are like I just love the the just the way you phrase things the way you bring a logical set of words to something that's bigger, but I love I love how you've left that. And I feel like everything we've talked about has been so powerful for anyone who's considering boards. But also I think it's so important to understand the history that leads you to be able to manage and run and facilitate the work in Zoo. So let me ask you a couple of rapid fire questions. These are unrelated to advisory boards, your life your history, but they're just of interest as we finish. Bought Boxes, boxes. Mac or PC,
PC PC, my wife. My wife is a Mac person. She drives me crazy. She's often she's always asking me how do I do this? I have no idea.
Got it. Current book on your night table. Not that you ever sleep but current book that sort of sits by you know, sort of your relaxed place.
That's a good one. Actually, I actually don't read physical books much anymore. Okay, I have a because I get up at 4am. Right, I have a four I have a 4pm routine, which is like every day that it's not raining. I go for a walk at 4pm and I listen to audiobooks. And I I'm just a fan of, you know, audiobooks about the future and that Yeah, the one one that I've read recently was called is indeed called the exponential age.
Exponential age. Okay. Would you recommend others listen to it?
Yes, very much indeed. Great book a great book.
Okay, what's the favorite web or phone app that gives you the best return on investment right now?
Oh, the English Premier League app on my phone. Wow. I am a course a soccer slash English football fan, the Premier League in particular and the Champions League and the World Cup and the Euros congratulations, Argentina. I just love all that stuff. And so I am constantly keeping my my keeping track of the scores and the fixtures and the the league table and everything.
Final question, what was the first question you asked chat? GPT Oh,
ah. Oh, you know, I actually haven't I actually haven't yet you haven't asked. Okay. Well, I have no, I have I've seen lots of other people playing with it. I loved I love to write I love to create I love to express. So I haven't actually experimented with it yet. I'm sure it will be for too long. And I heard last night I think while I was on my walk. I was listening to a podcast and I heard last night. I think one of the adverts or something that Microsoft Office will soon in Word and PowerPoint will soon have. I guess some chat GPT competing kinds of utility. Yeah,
don't really. Mike, you are a gem a genius and a and literally a ball of energy and fire. Like like phew, I know. And so how do people find you if they're looking for you where to find you?
Yeah, just go to Mike Richardson dot live everybody, Mike Richardson dot live and you'll find me there and you'll find everything that I do. I do a lot of work with advisory boards. Of course I do a lot of work with peer advisory boards. I do a lot of work in the space of agility I love to speak and facilitate and coach and and right and Yeah, Mike Richardson dot live everybody and we'll
make sure in the show notes that everything's linked to you and all your different places. But Mike, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you.
Is it time Is it is it time yet? It's really time for
you to have you Temecula wine. So thank you for being aboard and really appreciate you joining us today. Thank you