Melissa Aarskaug (00:01.836)
Welcome to another episode of the Executive Connect, where we explore the intersection of leadership, innovation, and personal development. Today, I'm excited to have Marty Strong with us here today. He is a retired Navy SEAL CEO, author, and motivational speaker. Welcome, Marty.
Marty (00:23.757)
How you doing, Melissa?
Melissa Aarskaug (00:25.186)
Good. I'm excited to hear about your journey from being a Navy SEAL to becoming a successful CEO and author. It's absolutely fascinating. Can you share a little bit about your transition from military to civilian life and what motivated you to pursue a career in business?
Marty (00:46.405)
Alright, now I'll try to make it sound fascinating. It didn't seem as fascinating during the trip, but I guess it's not too bad looking back at it. So I joined the Navy, I was 17 years old, weighed about 125 pounds, soaking wet, and ended up at the Seal Selection Course in Coronado, California.
There was a bunch of errors that got me there. didn't initially want to go there, but when I got there, a bunch of the older enlisted people talked me into staying. It's a volunteer program. So I volunteered and I said, Hey, you know, if it doesn't work out, the Navy will send you where you were supposed to go.
I put one foot in front of the other and along with another 126 students that started, six months later, 13 of us graduated. And that started a 20 -year career in the SEAL teams. I spent half of it as an enlisted SEAL.
and got an undergraduate degree in business administration while I was in the first 10 years of my service and then went to officers candidate school, came right back right back into the SEAL team. So my Navy experience was always in the SEAL teams, half enlisted and half officer. And then I retired.
went into the financial services industry. It's been eight years as a portfolio manager, primarily with UBS or United Bank of Switzerland. And then left that and got into some government work and eventually ended up somehow ended up as a CEO of a healthcare company. That's what I am right now. So that's kind of it in a quick nutshell.
Melissa Aarskaug (02:19.596)
I love it. So many different hats. Now, you've written not one, not two, but three bestselling books on leadership and strategy. What inspired you to start writing and how do you balance your writing with your other professional responsibilities as CEO?
Marty (02:38.277)
So I probably read about 60 books a year. I'd say probably 20 of the books are fiction and the rest of them are nonfiction. And I read every possible category you can think of. I read things about religion and philosophy and sociology and geopolitical issues. I read lots and lots of biographies. And that's something I've been doing ever since I was in my teens. Most people tell you if you want to write,
Read.
So the more you read, the more you're comfortable with the way the prose, the explanation on paper, different writers, different styles, different ways of communicating, inspiring, informing, whatever it is that you're trying to get across. And then, you know, in the military, have the right mission plans and you have to get up and present in front of people and explain exactly what you think is going to happen, what all the assumptions are, how your plan is going to deal with all the different issues and mitigate those issues, and how you think it's going to turn out, which I can tell you 90 % of the time,
That's not the way turns out, but you still have to go through that exercise and and that all kind of gives you a sense of structure between experiencing good writing and doing lots and lots and lots of storyboard style program management style planning processes as a seal. So it wasn't that hard.
to decide to write something and put pen to paper. So it was, I was doing lots of consulting, lots of coaching and mentoring as a kind of a side thing for my normal job. And somebody said, well, why don't you do this, you know, for money? Why don't you actually put a shingle out there and try to do this?
Marty (04:19.427)
And I didn't really think about it much, eventually I thought, well, okay, if I did that, what would I have to do? if it was a two or three or four year plan, kind of, if I want to get away from being a CEO someday. And I read, you know, it's good to have a book. It's good to have a platform of your thoughts, your philosophy, whatever it is, because you can always point to it. You can give it to people. can get.
halfway to whatever it is you're trying to convey. And that's how I wrote the first book, Be Nimble. I basically sat down and said, I'm gonna codify all the things I've been saying to people for years about different aspects of leadership and...
And I'll tell you that it's a daunting task. I have helped four or five other business leaders write their first books. And I feel good because every one of them had that same freeze moment that I had, which is nobody's going to want to read anything I have to say.
And you stare at the screen and you go, what am I doing? Nobody's going to want to know what Marty Strong, what he has to say, what his opinions are. There's a gazillion leadership books. I stopped and started and stopped and started like 15 times. And finally I sat down and said, I'm just going to write it and see what happens. Maybe I'll just turn it into a manual or something. And that's how I started with the first book. And eventually once you started getting the rhythm of it,
It's very humbling because you have to really look into what it is, not just what you think and how you conduct yourself as a leader, as a manager, as a creative person planning and thinking in the future, but
Marty (05:59.097)
you start to realize how many people influenced you. You start to realize that you're the sum total of all these different influences, mentors, different education events, experiences, good and bad experiences. I realized that I learned a lot and had a lot of core thoughts about business from observing bad examples. Actually, it seemed like that was a bigger contributor to my personal philosophy was seeing things go wrong.
Because then when things go wrong, you get to see how everybody reacts, intellectually and emotionally and professionally. And it's crazy, right? It's everybody, it's like COVID. Some people cry, some people crawl in the corner and hope it all goes away. Some people step up and suddenly, know, they're the proverbial lifting up the car to get the person out from under the car. They're suddenly have superhuman strength. All these weird reactions happen. And I remember all that. And I started thinking, okay, I can put this into my...
my discussion here. And that led to the second book, was more about looking at the horizon, thinking about strategy. And then the third book that's coming out here in December about creativity and innovation.
Melissa Aarskaug (07:07.394)
That's great. You said something I love. I think we learned so much from failing or mistakes we made or witnessing, like you said, the way that people do it wrongly. I have to imagine being a Navy SEAL, you've seen a lot of scary ways of things that have failed. So I want to switch a little bit to talk about defeating the fear of failure. And not just for yourself personally, but both professionally and personally.
So kind of going on what you were saying about your book, Be Nimble, you talked about a little bit about the creative mindset of a Navy SEAL. How does that mindset help you overcome fear? And what did you learn at your time being a SEAL that has helped you professionally?
Marty (07:58.191)
So I'll start with the definition of fear. mean, most people think of fear as physical fear, like being attacked on the street, that type of thing. I discuss more of the psychological, intellectual fear of failure. And it's a fear of failure, it's not a fear of bodily harm and or death or anything like that. So, you know, it's a little bit less on the consequence scale, but still, anybody that's listening to me knows exactly what it means because it can be debilitating.
You can have an event happen to you professionally or personally that basically strips away your sense of confidence. And you just kind of stand there wondering what are you going to do and or can you ever do anything again that it'll make a difference. So in the SEAL teams, it's all about preparation. So you constantly train. And I just watched a
Joe Rogan podcast with a Navy fighter pilot. And all I kept talking about is all we do is train, train, train. The training was harder than the real combat. was more stressful than the real combat, real combat. And that's exactly the way we would train. We would throw so many things at each other that we would fail every single time in practice. Think of it like if you're a boxer and every time you got in the ring for two years training to become a professional boxer, you got your butt kicked. But the point of that is when you're getting your butt kicked, you're learning.
And I think if any Navy SEAL or special ops professional would tell you that if somebody tells you that they had all these perfect missions, they're lying to you. Because even after you actually get out there and do a real combat mission, nine times out of 10, a lot of it starts to fall apart. The assumptions start to crumble. The intelligence is a snapshot of time. There's five people at the place you get there. There's 50 people at the place with guard dogs.
They were right when you took off in the plane, had to to wherever you were going to go to, but now it's a whole different situation. So you start to learn that the practice is important. It tells you how to intellectually and emotionally and competently deal with a constantly changing situation. The context is changing all the time. So you're not relying on perfection of outcome.
Marty (10:14.797)
We're always going to get there. We're always going to know we have enough gas to get to where we need to get. If you always do that, and then the day you run out of gas in the middle of nowhere on a lonely highway, you freak out. But if you practice for that.
And if you prep for that, you've got a tank of gas in the trunk, you get some other fallback plan, the fear factor starts to shrink because you prepared in advance for that situation that would possibly hit you with debilitating fear. So in business, you can do the same thing. In business, can look at these situations, can storyboard out.
a loss of your major, your biggest customer, a loss of a major market, a failure to penetrate a market the way you plan to, the loss of a key employee or leader. These are all things that you shouldn't just go la la down that road waiting for that thing to happen and then suddenly be caught, you know, flat footed. You should be thinking them through as a senior leader. You should be thinking it through as a leader and manager of a lot of different groups.
the different divisions of labor should all be sitting there every day saying, are we going to have enough gas? Are we going to have enough money? Are we going to have the right people? What happens if we don't? What happens if we don't? What happens if we don't? OK, how do we prepare for that day? And in advance, what do we do if that day comes? What's our fallback? What are our allies look like? What kind of resources can we tap into? Again, you're lowering the actual true impact of the failure and the fear of failure by preparing for that failure.
way in advance. And then the last thing in both cases is you just have to personally prepare yourself for the moment and know that when you're practicing failure, how did you react personally as a leader? And then be very honest with yourself and say, okay, I need to be calmer. I need to take a deep breath and not get all jacked up with all everybody else's emotions. I need to calm down. My function is to gather everybody and get them calmed down. And the more you think about that, the day it happens,
Marty (12:13.369)
you can surprise yourself. You won't even realize you're doing it. And later on, two weeks later, somebody said, yeah, when that happened, you were just calm and cool as ice. And you were just saying, you know, everybody get in here. Let's figure out how to reinvent the company. Let's figure out how we have to do whatever have do to get this thing done. So those are all the kind of the things that feed into both business and being a seal.
Melissa Aarskaug (12:34.486)
I love it. I want to talk about maybe one of your experiences during your time in the Navy that you had to confront and really overcome fear that you can share with our listeners. Maybe an example.
Marty (12:48.912)
So again, it's not physical fear, but I'll set it up because I've used this example in speeches. I was on, I guess it was about the 13th mission, combat mission. Eventually I had 36 and for 12 combat missions in a row, everything had basically worked. The plans.
pretty much worked and even when the plan fell apart, we came up with a plan like a pickup basketball game in the moment, in the dart, and we executed it. We found everybody we were supposed to find. We got the materials we were supposed to get off the street, weapons, all kinds of other things. We did everything we were supposed to do. And essentially I had like a 12 and 0 record as a leader. So I was the guy in command and my men...
you know, thought I'm pretty smart because I seem to be thinking through all this stuff and I was very calm and things weren't going exactly right. So everything was clicking, right? And then we had a really big mission where everybody in the world was looking at us. There were planes, intelligence collection planes that were looking down at us. There were people in the states that were paying attention to us on screens. There were
large forces that were staged to come in when we took a compound to come rushing in and they were all sitting there waiting for us and everybody was on radios and everybody was communicating and there's a checklist as you're going through all the steps and phases of the mission and they said it was like seven or eight of these steps left to the actual completion of the mission and everything started really going bad and
We were stuck in mud and 18 foot title change. We had to abandon our boats and we had to slog through this huge swamp and we were basically covered in mud from the top of our head to our feet. we probably, with combat equipment on and everything, we all probably had about 150 pounds of dead weight on our bodies while we were trying to climb through the swamp.
Marty (14:58.373)
We got lost in there, I I got lost in there because I was in charge of the navigation as the leader. And after about three or four hours of being in the swamp, which was two or three hours after we left the boat that dropped us off in the ocean, we popped out and there was the beach. We had actually gone on a huge U -turn for three and a half hours, suffered all that pain, and we were only about 50 yards away from where we had landed on the beach.
So, and this was a time when GPS wasn't reliable and you definitely couldn't use it in what we were doing. You could use it on boats and things because they needed big batteries, but we didn't have handheld GPS's. I sat down and I'm thinking, okay, and we were going after a really high value target, guy, an intelligence officer that they were trying to nab. So, everybody's watching and I felt like the entire
Seal Community was going to get a black eye if I had to pick up the phone and call and say, hey, I got lost. And I'm not going to get there in time because I had to be there exactly five o 'clock in the morning, take the compound down, grab this guy and then give an execution code word that brought the whole world in to take the compound and start, you know, wrapping the guy up and I guess, you know, digging around trying to see what was in the compound. So it's a long story, but.
I sat there and I was kind of full of the fear of failure and I was very close to sending the abort code and my chief video officer came over and kind of picked me up because we were all kind of kneeling, pulled me off to the side and said, we know this thing's inland, we know the beach is here, let's put our backs to the beach and let's just go straight in and try to keep the swamp to our side and maybe we'll get there. And I looked at him and he goes, come on, let's just do it. I said, all right.
So we hit a road and it was going exactly the same way. It wasn't on the map. So we started running and we ran for about two, two and a half hours with all that weight on us and all that mud on us. And, but no kidding about one minute before 5 AM, my point element ran into the compound fence. So we deployed around it. I sent out the code word saying in position and taking the thing down.
Melissa Aarskaug (17:13.142)
Mm.
Marty (17:21.337)
The thing is the rest of the world thought we were like super genius mission impossible seal guys, right? As far as they were concerned, we were, we did everything perfectly. But the problem was when it was all done and everybody was in there, we had a hundred army guys in there and they had big helicopters and they'd say, you guys want to ride back? And my chief looked at me, said the boats. And I went, no, we had to go back into the swamp and go find where we left the boats. So we weren't, we weren't done.
Melissa Aarskaug (17:48.418)
Ugh.
Marty (17:51.461)
It ended up being like a about a 20 -hour non -stop mission with all that drama in the middle of it and everything. So, but what it did is it humbled me from that point forward because, I mean, I try to figure out everything I could have possibly done differently and you can second guess yourself to death. But sometimes the only lesson you can pull out of there is sometimes you are going to fail flat out. There's no way you're going to fix it. And you just have to figure out how am going to deal with that?
and move on from that. And if you're leading other people, you know, they are looking to you for leadership. They're not looking to watch you go through some kind of psychological trauma in front of them.
Melissa Aarskaug (18:32.64)
Yep. Yeah. And really it's just going through it, right? The only way to go is just to go through it. And it sounds like that was, you you're really leading through crisis and chaos. something I want to kind of pull back a little bit is you emphasize the importance of preparing for like the worst case, like the boxers preparing for what could happen. And I like that, like kind of having a plan B, C for what could would happen.
Marty (18:39.735)
Yeah.
Melissa Aarskaug (19:01.898)
So I want to get kind of your thoughts on what you recommend for leaders to really prepare for the unexpected that could happen, like a company that's gone public, like what could happen if it fails and just kind of some of the things you've learned across that and your journey that you can share with our listeners.
Marty (19:22.447)
Sure, so let's stick with the comparison of the boxing. So in ultimate fighting, was it, ultimate fighting UFC, ultimate fighting combat river.
There used to be a time where was like regular boxing, professional boxing, where you had a lot of lead time. You were told, okay, you're going to box a certain person. You've got eight months to prepare. And so everybody would prepare. And in that case, what you're preparing for is that specific competitor, that opponent. They're tall, they have long arms, they're short. In the UFC, they're good at wrestling, they're not good at wrestling. And so you've got this profile that your coaches and your trainers put together.
And just like in any other sport where there's a competitor on competitor engagement, they map out your strengths against their weaknesses and then they state their strengths and try to figure out how to mitigate your weaknesses against their strengths. And so then you train to those elements, right? Very, very specific. Now the problem is as the UFC got more mature and there were more fighters and
There was a lot more money involved and a lot more opportunity to fight. The USC started calling up people and saying, hey, so -and -so just got hurt in training five days before the big competition. know, pay -per -view, everybody's going to see you. Do you want to fight? So people were out of shape because they were used to this big, preparatory period.
And some of them said no, but a lot of them said yes. And they went in there and they were so used to being perfectly dialed in to the exact person, the exact scenario that they didn't do so well. So it changed the mindset of the entire population of professional fighters. One, they couldn't get out of shape in between. They had to stay in close to fighting shape. Two, yeah, sure, you can really hone in and specialize your game plan to a very, very specific opponent. But three,
Marty (21:23.651)
What if that's not your opponent? So you need to have a basic set of skills that are about adaptability. There are general strengths in things like speed and anti -coordination and a ground game and all that. And you have to all those things all ready for you in case you have to adapt in the moment to something that you didn't anticipate perfectly. So in business,
The skills that a leader can be working on all the time is communications, the ability to mechanically think through the operations that they're going to be doing or the operations they are doing, going back and doing a diagnostic walkthrough. So they're very familiar with how the bread is made.
These are things that the more they understand about the mechanics, the easier it is when things start to fall apart to understand all the potential impact to those mechanics, those systems, those integrated processes, the supply chain feeding the organization, the markets, customers' opinions and attitudes, all these things. If you're detached from that.
If you've specialized your job as a leader, to just say, my job is to just focus on this one thing, or if you're picking leaders, if you're a board and you're trying to pick a leader, you think, what we need is somebody who's really good at international market expansion. So you put that person at the top of the organization. All right, what if all the rest of the stuff, the real part of day -to -day business is falling apart?
So you've got somebody who's over specialized and over focused looking at tunnel vision and unaware and maybe incapable of understanding what the people are telling them has to be done because of what's falling apart under the hood. So you got to do both. You got to build up these skills, communications, psychological resiliency, mechanical, basic understanding, awareness of all the key processes and systems.
Marty (23:09.623)
Understanding your market sufficiently, you could explain it to somebody. Understand how your customers are thinking about your product or services so that when somebody tells you there's a change in that, you get it. You don't have to be completely brief from scratch. That's all the basic skills. We call them standard operating procedures in the SEAL teams. Just move, shoot, and communicate. Those are just, those are a given. You have to be able to do that because when everything falls apart, you have to be able to move, shoot, and communicate.
And we do the scenario stuff and prepare for very specific targets and very specific situations. So it's not an either or. You have to kind of have a layer cake with the first part being your strong basic kind of conditional skills and then your ability to kind of focus in and aim on the specifics and unique aspects of any challenge or potential challenge.
Melissa Aarskaug (23:56.642)
Yeah, I think when I think of the Navy too, I think I love the way that they look at leadership and collaboration and working together and building a strategy and executing a plan and being prepared and all of those great pieces of leadership and teamwork. How do you think as a CEO now of a company, how do you think being in the Navy SEAL, being a Navy SEAL has helped you in the business world from a leader
leadership perspective.
Marty (24:30.085)
Well, a lot of what I've mentioned is part of the basic training in the military. Everybody's trained to be a leader to some level. The difference in the military that requires this of the military and the training from day one to the day you retire is the military expects somebody to step up into your place because the military is about combat. So if the lieutenant gets killed,
The sergeant steps up. If the sergeant gets killed, the corporal steps up. If the corporal gets killed, the private steps up. And everybody knows what the role is. They all know they have to take that hill or the whole battle plan starts to fall apart. And you train everybody for that expectation. train. And in training, they actually come up. The instructors and stuff will come up and say, they'll just point to somebody. They'll point to the medic and say, OK, he just got shot. He's down.
And now everybody else has to try to fix the medic. So they better have been paying attention during all the combat trauma medical classes, right? Because if you just think the medic's going to do it all for you, well, then you've missed one of the big points of reality in combat. They'll do the same thing with the leader. They'll just say, OK, Mr. So -and -so just got shot. Sergeant, you're in charge. Or in case of SEALs, chief, you got it. Well, if the chief hasn't been paying attention or trying to become a good leader,
He's certainly been made aware that this is one of his roles and responsibilities. And I'm talking about all kinds of leadership, including tactical leadership. He can't say, well, the officer is going to handle all that, and I'll just worry about this stuff over here. Everybody has to be tuned in. That's something that you learn in every military branch. That's something that's really, really important in small units like the SEALs, the Green Berets. There's not enough people to backfill. If you've only got five or six people in a mission, you know, it's...
You're five or six people full of capabilities and one person goes down. That's like five capabilities going down because everybody can do multiple things. So everybody has to do everything else. Everybody else does it. Like the medical example, very rarely did I ever see somebody get shot, blown up, hurt or anything like that, where the medic was the first person to be on that person treating them. It was always the closest person to them because they knew how to do it because we trained everybody to do it.
Marty (26:50.941)
They knew how to stabilize them. They knew how to prepare them for evacuation. They knew how to drop, you know, put IVs in. They knew how to do all that stuff. And they did it so fast because we trained to it all the time. So all these different things that we were trained to are skills that are part of that SOP, that standard operating, that basic requirement and condition. So if you learn all that in the military and you go into a non -military environment, it could be a nonprofit or it could be, you know, a business.
The hard thing for a military person in that situation is that everybody around you wasn't trained that way. So right now, if I went to Fort Bragg or if I went to Marimar in California or Fort Bliss, Texas, and I walked into a unit, I would be surrounded by people that were trained to do all the things I just told you. I didn't train them. That's just the way the culture is. That's the requirement of the job. Yeah. Right. But if I walked into any company, you know,
Melissa Aarskaug (27:42.222)
process, right? It's the strategy.
Marty (27:48.165)
within driving distance of my house, 99 times out of 100, if I walked in there, they would all be pigeonholed and stove piped into very specific technical areas.
Melissa Aarskaug (27:58.677)
Yes.
Marty (27:59.575)
And even if the bosses gave lip service to it or the organizational chart made it look like they were all interacting and matrixing and everything, human beings left to their own desserts will go to the thing that they do best because they want to be treated well. And the more expert they are, the more they're considered the single point of expertise, the higher their value. And so that's what they tend to generate and gravitate towards. So it's hard, but you have to as a leader and military leaders know this, you have to constantly throw them in together.
You have to talk to each other. have to meet each other. You have to interact. You have to be empathetic about what's going on in accounting, even though you're over here in marketing, because everything is connected. Everything's got some type of sinew that's making, if finance isn't doing well and there's not enough money, then marketing doesn't have enough money for their next promotional campaign. They're not sure why. They're just upset, but they don't realize that there's a problem over here. production's got a problem. You see what I mean? Everybody, they're stovepiped, nobody knows
why anybody's in that situation. And the leader may try to talk to all the top leaders of those different divisions or departments, but then that means somebody else in those positions have to turn around and communicate all this reality to everybody else and try to get empathy that way. Really hard to do. Much better to get multidisciplinary teams, project groups, put them in a room. And when you start hearing what everybody else has to do for their day and what the problems that they're running into,
you have an accountant talk about what it's like to go through an audit to somebody who doesn't even know what an audit is. And, and, and eyebrows will go up. Really? You know, somebody just comes in and stops your whole day for like two weeks and does this to you. Yeah, they do it every year and you guys don't really know anything about it. And meanwhile, you're screaming at me through emails. Why isn't this, why isn't this information in my hands yet?
Melissa Aarskaug (29:34.541)
Right.
Melissa Aarskaug (29:50.51)
Right. They only have their perspective, right? I think we're all kind of siloed if you're marketing or sales or finance, everybody's pretty siloed in their role. And I love kind of what you were saying about, you know, if one leader is something that a step out or something happened to them, the next one steps up. And I think kind of going back to what you were saying about your first 12,
tours and how they were easy and then you get to your 13th tour and it wasn't easy. I want to talk a little bit about staying engaged and motivated. think like a lot of times people show up to work, they go to work, they're kind of going through the motions, if you will, and they're showing up at eight, leaving at five. And so I want to talk about how to keep people motivated, engaged and continuing forward for whatever the mission, whether it's
you know, the mission for the Navy or a business, really staying engaged during challenging times. I know, you know, the one thing I would say during the pandemic, a lot of companies, no matter what industry, had a lot of challenges and a lot of struggles and really keeping, you know, leaders focused and engaged towards the mission is really key during really challenging times. I want to get kind of your perspective on keeping people motivated and engaged on whatever the mission is.
Marty (31:17.561)
I'm going start by saying it's very difficult in the private sector compared to the military. Everybody in the military is mission focused. Everybody in the military is told what their mission is almost every single solitary day, multiple different ways. Everybody in the military practices their mission or missions, if they have multiple missions, probably about every month. And then they're also judged and
measured and graded and critiqued and then they go back and lick their wounds and try to figure out how to do it better and then it happens all over again non -stop. The consequences of failure in the military are life and limb. So you don't want to let people around you down because it could be really bad. It's not just losing a job, it's not just losing a contract with somebody, it's a big deal. So I say that because
I was the beneficiary of that. Anybody who's been a military leader was the beneficiary of that. Again, it's a cultural thing, but it's a developed cultural thing. It doesn't just happen. When they come into boot camp, those kids are not that way. They work, right, nonstop. Which shows you there is a training element to it. It was a trained mindset. It's not a mind, we didn't go through high schools and pick people out that thought this way and created the military with them.
Melissa Aarskaug (32:28.716)
they're practicing and being coached consistently, right? And training and training.
Marty (32:43.767)
It's a mindset that's cultivated and sustained. So now you go to the commercial side. You can't expect anybody to stay and work nonstop because they believe that if they don't, somebody's going to die or lose a leg. It's a whole different level of commitment, right? And a lot of guys that I know in the military, when they first come out, they just don't know how to step it down because they're just going to transfer that level of intensity.
and commitment and just they get super frustrated and when they talk to me I'll say, a minute, these guys are coming to pay their bills with this job. This isn't their life. They're not like warrior monks that have committed their body and soul to the nation kind of thing. That's a whole different requirement, a whole different job description. So the best thing you can do to answer your question more directly,
is what I was saying before. I believe you have to kind of try to give an impression when you're hiring people what they're getting into. If you have an organization that's going to be like this, know, measure twice, cut once up front. Don't just go with the specs and the alignment from the resume. And don't just do an interview that just regurgitates the resume as a set of questions. Are they going to fit in in a dynamic organization if you have one, if that's what you're trying to create?
Are they going to fit in in project work? Can they work with other people? Do they seem to be willing to take some risks professionally or are they aware that, you know, saying what they think is not a professional risk? It shouldn't be perceived that way.
Really, in a good open -minded organization, you shouldn't keep your mouth shut and keep the information about what's critical to yourself because you're afraid if you say something, you're going to get in trouble, lose your job, upset somebody. Leaders have to make sure that's the environment that's friendly to that type of thing. Go ahead and fail in public with your thoughts and your ideas. No harm, no foul. Any ideas worth listening to. You have to then, once you've got those people in there, you have to get them in those
Marty (34:47.865)
group sales telling you about. You have to bring them in in multidisciplinary scenarios because that empathy, most people are just good people. And if you're sitting there and you realize that if you walk out at four o 'clock and there's four other people in there turning and burning because they're up against a deadline, if you don't know about it and you don't know those people, maybe you don't care about it. But if you do, maybe you come over there and say, there any way I can help? Now they may say no, it's an accounting audit.
Melissa Aarskaug (35:10.158)
Yeah, it's a great, yeah.
Marty (35:17.573)
and you're in marketing, but they may say, can you go get us some pizzas? Because we're going to be here till 11 o 'clock tonight. And that's the beginning of everybody kind of, it's a cross -cultural understanding that we're all in it together. Again, not a high military, God and country kind of bar of purpose, but it does give everybody a human reason to stick around and to help each other out. And then the technical informational kind of empathy of what you do, what I do, what they do.
You don't whine and complain and jump up and down when you don't get your way so much because you know there's something else that's bigger and maybe more critical going on right now. All those things help.
Melissa Aarskaug (35:53.432)
And that's a great, and that's a really great point, Marty, is, you know, helping until the job's done, whether it's the pizzas, like you mentioned, or organizing the papers off the coffee machine to get the audit done, or whatever you can do, is really being all in in a team, because really it's a mission. It may not be life or death, but it's a mission that's gonna drive the business forward. so it takes all hands on deck.
to get the missions done. So I wanna talk a little bit, like the Navy and other branches. And I haven't been in, but from your perspective, I always feel like there's creative thinking or better ways to do things and they really harness different ways to do better and to maybe engineer things better.
create new realities or new ways, new processes of doing things. And it's kind of feels like it's always getting better with our military and Navy. I feel like they're just really on their A game all the time. So I wanna talk a little bit about thinking big and being creative, maybe engineering your new reality and going back to your book, The Visionary, you discuss the importance of strategic leadership.
and how leaders can develop and implement a vision for their organization on what those goals, what the mission is. Can you share a little bit about maybe some obstacles that prevent leaders from thinking big and maybe how they can also overcome them?
Marty (37:34.053)
So Be Visionary, it started out as a kind of a self -help book for people who should already be visionary. I was looking at, and this came out of one of the chapters in Be Nimble, I said a little bit about strategy and when my thoughts were on strategy, or the lack of strategy being exercised and practiced in business today.
And I have beta readers that read my books. read chapter by chapter. So had these four or five CEOs that were reading chapter by chapter, giving me feedback, which, you know, I was talking about, you know, keeping me humble. So they, you know, this is stupid. This doesn't make sense. This resonates. I remember doing this and I forgot this lesson learned. I'm going to, I took notes the whole time during this chapter and I'm going to have my, my direct reports come in tomorrow morning. We're going to talk about some of these things. Well, one of the things they brought up was you should write a whole book on strategy because they don't teach strategy in high school. They don't teach strategy in college.
And they don't teach strategy in American business. What they expect everybody to do is work at the operational and technical levels, keep their nose clean, put their tenure in, whether it's in one company or in an industry. And then they get to a point where they're suddenly that they're the cherry on the top of the oar chart. And they're going, do it, think big. And they walk out the door and you're like, think big, okay. And all you do is what you've been doing, which is operational planning. So you take
your normal operational history and you add four or five percent to it for next year and you just flop that whole thing forward in a linear fashion and go, that's my strategy and that's not strategy. And this was what they were all saying was critically missing from all these different, you know, sources of education and influence in society and business. So and education. So the first part of the B visionary just says, hey, you know, it's OK to dream. And there's a certain point near in your.
your maturation where somebody tells you it's stupid when you tell me you a dream. So you stop telling people about your dreams. And I'm not talking about nightmare dreams. I'm talking about, maybe I want to be a lead singer in a rock band, or maybe I want to go to Bora Bora in a canoe. And if you see these things, you're thinking of it. You have a sense of wonder and awe and mystery about life and everything around you.
Marty (39:53.057)
And anybody you say that to, family, friends, institutions, schools, everybody, it's like you're that proverbial nail that's sticking up out of the board. Because that's not going to help you, kid. That kind of thinking is not going to get you anywhere. You need to study. You need to get a job. You need to get good grades. You get into a good college so you can get a good job. And then when they're going to keep your nose clean, don't tick off anybody. Do what you're told to do until you work up there and you're the person in charge.
That's the formula of success, not thinking of all these dumb thoughts. And so it's drilled and pushed and slammed until you stop thinking that dreaming is okay. So that's what the first couple of chapters start up with is essentially letting you know that this is what's been happening to you. And actually what's happened is people have taken away a superpower that all human beings have, and you need to reengage and reignite that superpower and start thinking that way, which is simply just thinking out to the horizon.
and practicing it every single day. Think out a couple of months, think out a year, think out two years. Think about yourself personally, what do want to be? Start picturing yourself. It's like visualization games that top athletes use. Visualize success, visualize the future, and then open up the aperture. Don't just look down the road, but look all around you. What's going on in the community? What's going on in your industry, in your market? And what are your competitors going to do?
Melissa Aarskaug (41:17.294)
I love that you said that. I think that's a really fantastic point. My father's also a Navy man, and so he used to say similar things where he would say things like, how you play is how you practice. If you're not practicing right when you play in the actual game, you're not going to play right. So you've got to be, you
building a plan and executing the plan and practicing. And I work, Marty, in the cybersecurity field a lot. And I see people that have like a great plan. It's supposed to work great, but nobody's actually run the plan or run the play. And so when something actually happens, they have all these things in place, but nobody's practiced. And so everybody's looking at each other like, hey, you know what we're supposed to do or who are we supposed to call or where are we supposed to go? So I think...
you're spot on with that and talking about being visionary, I think that's another really great point is like you said, like you're told to go to school, get a good job, work your job, but what does it mean? Like what does that mean? Right? Go to school, get a good job, follow these strategy. think, you know, really like you said, setting one year, two year goals, five year goals, where do I want to be? What do I want to do? And holding yourself.
accountable and running your plan, right? So if your plan says I want to publish a book in five years and you're almost at that five -year mark, but you haven't started writing, it's likely that you're not going to publish that book. So I think you're spot on with really fostering that, you know, dream building for yourself and creating kind of visions of, love what you said about
you know, a lot of athletes, like I said before multiple times in speaking, Michael Jordan, he threw that basket so many times in his brain, even more than he actually practiced the basket. So really, like you said, visualizing and being creative, running your plan. And I also like, you know, want to get your perspective on, you know, encouraging leaders to create a culture.
Melissa Aarskaug (43:21.59)
of creativity and innovation and coming up with better ways to do things than just let's call it the status quo. so how do you get maybe, like you said, somebody that's leaving for the day and the CPAs are still on there working on their audit, how do you get them to come up? You maybe they notice something. How do you really foster that in an organization to get people to speak up with better ideas or?
creative ways of doing things inside of a company culture.
Marty (43:54.799)
Great question and great segue because my third book was an answer to that question. I'm on the board of two different technology companies and looking at the subject and actually the problem of creativity and the studies that are done about creativity and the, it's like teams back in the 80s and 90s.
somebody decided that teams was the way to win. So everybody was going to have a team, go up, be a team, be a team. And without really understanding what a team was. And most of what they did is they put together groups of people that ended up being committees. And the definition between those two, guy named Alan Weiss wrote a book on consulting. And he said, basically, if you want to know whether you're in a committee or a team, look around and see if anybody's going to lose their job if this doesn't work out right.
Because if you're on a sports team, everybody's a loser if they lose. Not half the team sitting over there kind of sort of won, or they dodged the loot, the loss. They're all part of the loss. If you're in a military unit and you get your butt kicked, you're all part of getting your butt kicked. That's how you know you're in a team. You've got a stake in the outcome. You're a committee if everybody comes in, says their piece, and walks out. So that's the same problem with creativity. There was a big push.
About a decade ago. Hey, you know, we all need to be like Steve Jobs. You all need to be, you know, like Bill Gates. We all we can all do this. That's all be Elon Musk and Discovery in a room would just be creative like go well, yeah you run into the same problems I talked about earlier with the idea of dreaming and vision because and there's studies out there will show that from the age of six years old to the age of 40
At six years old, most six -year -olds have about a 95 percentile score in creativity tests. It's just an innate human capability. At 40, they have like 5 percent, 5 percent score. They're in the very bottom, right? And the study showed nothing happened to them. They didn't get dementia. It's not like...
Marty (46:04.867)
puberty, they don't go from being super genius creative people and then one day when they're teenagers they aren't anymore. It's not a lost skill. It's actually a biological capability of the human brain that hasn't changed because of age. What's changed, and there's one study that I cited in my third book that points this out pretty clearly, what changes the education institutions in the United States
said what I mentioned earlier, you're not supposed to be thinking about the way things might be. You're supposed to be studying the way things were.
In every category of preschool and elementary and middle school and high school and college, every category is a history lesson. It's how engineering has been done, how medicine has been done, right? So what happens is you are told not to think those crazy thoughts. There's a good reason why guys like Gates and others dropped out of college and became billionaires.
It's a good reason why, you know, Einstein was in his early 20s when he came up with the special theory of relativity. Alexander the Great was in the mid to late 20s when he conquered the known world. These people, Napoleon was 23 when he became a brigadier general. So this is youth. And the reason these guys were doing this is because they didn't know any better. Nobody had forced the rules down their throat and got them to adhere, obey, and...
and comply. Now I'm talking intellectually. So basically what you have to do if you want to reignite creativity as an adult is you have to recognize this. You have to recognize this is what's been going on, this has been happening to you. It's not a physical problem, it's not a physical deficit. Everybody can be creative and
Marty (47:52.451)
The main, I have like a three step thing that I had to kind of break it down to something easy, but you have to become intellectually humble, which means you forget all of your past victories and all your past failures because they are going to contribute to you channeling down and narrowing what you're gonna do when the next challenge comes across your desk. Now your mind's clean of that, clear of that. Now you have to be intellectually curious.
And what that means is you have to look at every possible aspect, every source of information, asymmetrical intelligence gallery, 360 degree awareness. Talk to everybody you haven't talked to. Talk to other companies, even other industries about things. And if you're in a staffing company and you're having a problem with the pipeline, go talk to somebody who manages pipelines all day at DHS or FedEx. It's supply chain management. Maybe they've got an angle to it that you've never heard before.
But don't just sit there with the same four five people and don't apply what you learned in college or what you did for the last four years and just flip that football play forward and say, that's the solution. That means you're not thinking or trying to learn at all. Intellectual curiosity, which is almost impossible to do without that intellectual humility up front. And the last thing is that sets you up for intellectual creativity. That means that whatever you're going to do now, whatever solution you're going to set up, whatever your solution design outcome is going to be.
is going to be the best thing you can do with the best available information that you can absorb and can collect. And if you have a team of people thinking that way, I mean, you've got a powerhouse of creativity and innovation right there.
Melissa Aarskaug (49:26.668)
Yeah, I love it. So many, so many good nuggets of wisdom, Marty. I love what you shared. We've covered a lot, right? I think any final thoughts or anything that you want to share that we may have missed before we close up.
Marty (49:44.709)
I think this is always amazing to me. So I work a lot with veterans that are leaving service, and most of the ones that have stayed in for at least 20 years or so. And they have difficulty trying to figure out what they want to do on the outside. And then when they get into their first company, they don't do well. And part of it is because they can't figure out how to fit in. That disconnect between full mission focus,
You the brotherhood, you know, everybody's going the same way with the same, with the same song in their heart kind of thing. They're not finding it. Right. And so they get depressed and they get upset. or they were very senior and they worked their way to the pinnacle of their, of their profession. They were a squadron commander of, you know, fighter planes or their Navy SEAL, whoever. And they don't want to go out and be anything less than that. They don't know how to be anything less than that. They don't remember that they used to be less than that because their whole life up to that point has been trying to progress up this.
this to -do list of getting ahead and getting advanced and getting promoted and all that and learning and becoming better. The problem is if you're an F -18 pilot, combat vet, and you got a chest full of medals and you want to own a restaurant, they don't work. You have to go out and become an apprentice and learn how to run a restaurant.
You have to an apprentice to learn how to finance the purchase of a restaurant. You need to go out and become an apprentice on how to hire the right kind of people to be in there working for you in that restaurant. And that's going be different than if you can run a warehouse operation or if you can run a taxi company. You can't just automatically assume that all this magnificence conveys. I had a talk I gave a while ago. I actually called it, thank you for your service. And I was giving it to military guys, but it was kind of a tongue in cheek. Like leave all that.
Melissa Aarskaug (51:20.728)
Yeah.
Marty (51:29.837)
stuff behind. It's kind like your football trophy from high school. You know, it all has value, right? But if you really want to go do something else and make this, what's the second part of your life going to look like? You are going to put the same amount of time in you did as a young fighter pilot or young Navy SEAL in this new thing you want to do.
Melissa Aarskaug (51:50.286)
that's so good. That's so good, Marty. I think you're right. I think if you're going to switch careers or you're going to pivot industries or you're going to become an entrepreneur, you got to start over. You might have to take 10 steps back to take one step forward. And, you know, I've always, another, you know, one of my dad isms is to be okay in the stock as you're learning and put in the time, right, to learn and to kind of undo.
you maybe some of the, you know, knowledge you have that may not be correct in the new fields that you're in. So I love that, that you mentioned that's such a good way to.
Marty (52:28.833)
Yeah, from a practical standpoint, tell everybody, try to figure this out early, a couple years before you switch professions and start planning and experimenting in parallel, or planning, experimenting, and learning, training, getting your certifications in parallel. And then slowly start building up that side gig kind of flow.
Melissa Aarskaug (52:47.437)
Yep.
Marty (52:52.741)
and start aiming towards that day. Don't, you know, but in that, course, hardly anybody does that, right? Either they get let go and they're standing on the street and they really hated the profession. really want to do something different, but they haven't given one minute of thought to it or effort to it. Or like in the military, one day you're in a desk with a conference table, all these guys coming in, you're making all these big decisions. The next day you're saluting a flag and you're walking out the gate and you go to 7 -Eleven and you're standing there with everybody else going, dude, you're just a regular dude.
Melissa Aarskaug (53:22.54)
And that's a really good point. I think back to when I was trying to decide, quote unquote, what did it be when I grew up? I did, like you said, I spent some time learning the industry. I spent some time job shadowing people. I almost became a patent attorney and I job shadowed some patent attorneys. And I said, absolutely no way I want to be a patent attorney. So you're right. You got to put some time and effort into the switch.
know, job shadow people, call people that maybe are in that field and they can tell you the good, bad and ugly of what you're looking to get into. I think those are all really good nuggets of wisdom. Marty, I wanna thank you so much for being here today and sharing your time and wisdom. Get Marty's book, connect with him. There's so much good information in there. Thank you so much for being here today, Marty. And that's the Executive Connect podcast.
Melissa Aarskaug (54:21.932)
I love it. Thank you so much, Marty.
Rolf, are you still there? Did we lose you? Rolf's not there. He had a drop. He a drop. He went over four. Did it say 100 % on your side, Marty?
Marty (54:41.285)
99 still.
Melissa Aarskaug (54:42.892)
Okay, let me see if I can.
Stop the recording.
Melissa Aarskaug (54:54.476)
I lost track of time. Brian, did he say just to end it?
I don't want to end it. So what kind of healthcare, Marty? What industry?
Marty (55:09.317)
So it's a.
Marty (55:15.109)
Elder care. So I have, I have 80 doctors and nurses that we provide to 40 skilled nursing facilities and rehab facilities and another 20 assisted living facilities, pretty large ones. There usually have to be about a hundred beds or more. And, and so it's, it's geriatric medicine when it comes to the assisted living facilities.
Melissa Aarskaug (55:16.269)
Okay.
Marty (55:43.429)
They're all ages in the skilled nursing facilities. are the short time stays. And yeah, so I had four or five companies under one umbrella organization. I was the CEO at the top and I was an investor and I had a board and all that. Still have the board, but we've slowly divested and sold and spun out the different companies. Now all that's left is this medical company. And when I bought it in 16,
It was one employee and 26 doctors and nurses, and they only worked inside Richmond. And now we're all over the state of Virginia and a couple other states. And yeah, so it's a lot bigger. rather than I'm trying to find somebody else to take over the company in the short term, since I didn't have an empire to be the CEO of anymore, the board asked me if I would stick around for a couple of years and just kind of baby this company along some more.
So that's what I'm doing.
Melissa Aarskaug (56:41.55)
I love it. I love it. That's so interesting. It's funny how we end up where we end up, right? So interesting. I laugh because I started my career in finance. I moved into civil engineering and then I moved into the mortgage industry because all my friends were making crazy coin in 2005. Back into the engineering field, then I applied for the wrong job and got into the casino gaming industry.
Marty (56:49.402)
Yeah.
Melissa Aarskaug (57:09.964)
And now I'm in cybersecurity and it's all just, and it's regular that people approach me to pivot industries. I feel like I'm an expert in it now, change and re -learning new things.
Marty (57:23.011)
Yeah, but there must be some core trait though. Like in my case, I'm really good at assessing damage. I'm really good at assessing damage in an organization and figure out where the broken areas are and then coming up with kind of a weighted first things first plan. And it doesn't really matter. mean...
Melissa Aarskaug (57:44.493)
Yep.
Marty (57:47.725)
My doctors, a lot of them haven't met me, but when they meet me, they always assume I'm a doctor, because how could I be this, you know, it's funny, right? And then if I tell them what I, I said, no, I was an Navy SEAL. They're like, look at me, I have three heads. But the reason I been doing what I've been doing, even when I was managing money with UBS, it had to do with crisis. It to do with crisis and emotion. And, you know, people react really weird in the market when it comes to stocks and things. And
Melissa Aarskaug (57:52.013)
Yeah.
Melissa Aarskaug (58:04.078)
Do I end it? he say?
Marty (58:15.557)
You find yourself, you think you're going to be analyzing markets and technically looking at the economy and everything. Instead, you're hand -holding high net worth people because they're just people and they're scared they're going to lose their nest egg or the whole proceeds of the sale of their business that they grew for 30 years. I mean, it's about people and emotion and leadership. You have to lead these people through their plan and create plans for them. So that's kind of my core thing. I've been in lot of different places, doing lot of different things, but that tends to be...
Melissa Aarskaug (58:37.186)
Yep.
Marty (58:45.209)
throw me into the mess, have me figure out how to reorganize the mess, and then start to get people to fix the mess. You know, that's kind of...
Melissa Aarskaug (58:52.544)
I love it. We're bred from the same cloth, right? I think that's, I love to take a puzzle that's a giant mess and put it all back together while driving revenue. think that's my, it's funny, you mentioned it in our call, like so much of the world is like, you're just a marketer or you're just an engineer or you're just a this. And it's funny because I've never in my entire career been just a this. Like every job I've had.
you know, for let's see, 25 years has been, I've been a lot of different hats. And so so much of the world now is like, are you in marketing? no, you're not marketing. You're in sales. No, I'm in, I'm in kind of everything up to delivery. It's interesting. You know, I've been called recently, they're like, you should take a CEO role. You've got all the like traits. I'm like, you know,
Marty (59:30.372)
Yeah.
Melissa Aarskaug (59:51.608)
No, I'd rather be like you said, be in the like putting everything back together and figuring out solutions and you do that one and you do this one. But it's a fun, healthcare's my husband just got into healthcare and he's never been in healthcare and he's like pulling his hair out for how long it takes to get anything done in healthcare is just crazy.
Marty (01:00:19.925)
It's a mirror reflection. The defense industry is a mirror reflection of the Department of Defense. Hugely, hugely inefficient bureaucracies and they don't have any compelling reason to move any quicker because the government's not going to move any quicker. if your client's going at one mile an hour, why do you need to go up 40 miles an hour? And it's the same thing in healthcare. Pretty much all healthcare, one way the other, unless you're in cash type medicine like cosmetic surgery and things like that.
You are moving at the speed of CMS, Medicare. Nothing's going to improve. Nothing's going to go fast. And if you come in there you want to be a world shaker, you find out pretty quick, really. But the best you can do is figure out how to optimize and become super efficient at things like collecting the net dollars and making sure that the claims go through with a maximum. It's down to this weird kind of, I always watch.
Melissa Aarskaug (01:00:54.648)
Yep. Yep.
Marty (01:01:19.077)
gold and treasure shows, like gold rush. You know, it's about taking 10 tons of dirt, throwing it into the hopper, having it all shake out, wash out, and then eventually somebody's gonna get like, you know, this much gold after all that effort for three days. And that's, you know, it's crazy. And that's not, to me, that's not fun. That doesn't really, you know, float my boat, but it's critical because if that's not being done right, the whole thing falls apart.
Melissa Aarskaug (01:01:44.43)
Yep, it's so true, it's so true, I love it. Well, thank you so much for being on. I love chatting with you. We're like 30 days out to get it post -produced and we'll share with you, tag you all the right things. Would love if you reshare it and follow us on YouTube and LinkedIn and all the places. But if there's anything we can help you with, just let us know.
Marty (01:02:08.751)
Okay.
Marty (01:02:12.237)
All right, Melissa, thanks. Nice meeting you too. You too. Bye bye.
Melissa Aarskaug (01:02:13.24)
Thanks so much, you too, have a good day. Bye.