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Fascinating conversations with founders, leaders, and experts about product management, artificial intelligence (AI), user experience design, technology, and how we can create the best product experiences for users and our businesses.
Kyle (00:01.207)
All right, welcome to another episode of Product by Design. I am Kyle. And this week we have another awesome guest with us, David CM Carter. David, welcome to the show.
David CM Carter (00:11.726)
Thank you very much for inviting me, Gal.
Kyle (00:14.519)
David, I'm really excited to have you, really excited to talk about some of your experience, but let me do a brief introduction for you and then you can tell us a little bit more about yourself. David CM Carter is a serial entrepreneur, otherwise known as the world's leading CEO mentor with 40 plus year track record in creating innovative businesses. There's a lot to unpack there. So before we do that, why don't you tell us a little bit more about yourself?
David CM Carter (00:42.03)
Well, I'm 65. I left school when I was 18. So I've been at work 46 years now. I didn't go to university. The first 10 years of my career, I worked for two international investment banks, the Hong Kong and Shanghai bank and Security Pacific and American bank.
I worked on the East and West Coast of America for a year. I worked in the Far East for a year, the Middle East for a year and a half, Europe for a year and a half. So during those 10 years, I spent seven years working and living overseas in investment banking. And I ended up with a fascination, which has carried on throughout my entire life. When you're in venture capital,
You wonder how come those two companies started in the same town in the same year with access to the same resources? And 10 years later, one of them is 27 times bigger than the other one. What did the outperformer do or have that the other one didn't do or have? And I always referred to that during those 10 years as performance X factor, which was all to do with a leadership.
culture.
David CM Carter (02:10.734)
The more and more I understood that, the more it had to do with character.
and because everyone's got access to money, talent, resources, everything, the same, software, but some people create a culture that optimizes the human potential of their organization a lot better than another one, and that's became a fascination, and then that fascination has been a red thread throughout my entire career since.
And it might be worth sharing with your audience the history of the word Entelechy. It's a wonderful word. And so it was coined by Aristotle about two and a half thousand years ago. The Entelechy of an acorn is an oak tree. The Entelechy of a caterpillar is a butterfly.
and the IntelliKey of Kyle is the ultimate version of Kyle with all of his potential fully actualized. And I think throughout my life, I've always had a belief that nearly everybody that you ever meet has more potential than they realize. And so I guess for almost the last 35 years of my career, I've been helping people optimize and actualize that.
potential they didn't or didn't think they had. So, and this is my legacy project. I think it brings together all of my entrepreneurial experience from starting companies, raising money, putting teams together, selling companies, floating companies.
David CM Carter (04:03.982)
it's given me an opportunity to pull everything together that I've ever done in my life. I've had a few fabulous success stories, but I've also had a few failures and the disasters I've learned from equally. And it's about the... If we look around the world and think of all the problems that we can see on our TV screens on a daily basis, I believe that...
the only way we're ever gonna solve these problems is to raise humanity's consciousness. And the way we raise humanity's consciousness is through developing character. And so, you know, my legacy project is bringing all my business experience together and my leadership experience, but also creating a platform and a company and a service that will help every individual on the planet.
optimize their potential, actualize their potential through developing 54 character qualities.
So that's a bit about me. What else? From when my daughter was seven and my son was three, I had a tectonic plate shift in my life and became a single parent. And so I brought my children up on my own for 20 years until they left home and they still talk to me. So that's a miracle. And yeah, that's probably a high level summary.
We can dive into any of that if you're interested.
Kyle (05:43.735)
I think that's great. And I definitely want to dive into a number of things that you brought up there. Before we do, maybe you can tell us about anything that you like to do outside of work or outside of the things that you're kind of working on right now.
David CM Carter (06:01.16)
When I left school in 1977, the retirement age was 65. And so I should be retiring now, but I'm still working 18, 19 hour weeks every week and evenings and weekends. And so my, how do I decompress, switch off from work? Although I find that very difficult. I've got a three year old working black Labrador.
and I live in the countryside and I've always had working dogs before, so I had border collies when I was younger, but when I moved here, lots of people around here go shooting and even though I'm a very good shot, I don't want to shoot live birds, but she's trained or bred to pick them up. And so a good way to integrate into the local community is to have a dog that can go on a shoot and all that sort of stuff.
I had to learn a whole bunch of new tricks how to train a retriever when I had never had one. Last summer she won the regional platinum gundog award for a puppy. I've loved learning how to learn a new way to train. I've loved having a new breed that's completely wired differently to the dogs I've had before.
love being outside and so I do my 10 ,000 steps every day with the dog to get some fresh air in nature. That's how I switch off, that's what I do outside of work. That's pretty much it.
Kyle (07:41.143)
That's great.
David CM Carter (07:42.382)
And I've also, in August last year, I had my first grandchild and so at least once a fortnight, I go and see my daughter and my grandson.
Kyle (07:52.791)
Well, congratulations. Those are super, super exciting. Having a grandchild and having a lab that you train like that. I have a golden retriever and a golden doodle and they're both great dogs, but neither are trained well enough to do that. I think they both possess the innate skills like you talked about, but they would have a long way to go to be winning awards for gun dogs like you said.
But I want to dive into a number of things that you brought up about your current legacy project, like you mentioned, and some of the things that you're working on. So tell us kind of more about your current role. What brought you to that? You mentioned kind of bringing together all of this knowledge and leadership experience into the current work that you're doing, but tell us more about that. What is...
the, what are the things that you're working on? You mentioned kind of the, the Antelike, this word orange, and tell us more about kind of the academy that you've established and what you're focused on there.
David CM Carter (09:10.51)
You mentioned earlier on in my introduction, and it always makes me laugh, that I'm also known as the world's leading CEO mentor. And I probably was for a number of years with some justification. I'm not sure if I can claim that anymore because I haven't done any CEO mentoring for five or six years. And...
borrowing from Richard Branson. I always say to people when they ask me about that, well, I'm not sure if I really am the world's leading CEO mentor, but I'm definitely in the top one. But I worked for, you know, thick end of 25 years mentoring CEOs. I built up and eventually became the world's leading chief executive mentoring company with offices and clients around the world. And...
going back to what I was describing about the first part of my career, what I was working on with all of those mentoring classes, how do they become the best version of themselves and their company become the best version of itself so it could out -compete the competition and end up as the one who ended up 27 times bigger than the competition. And so that was working with the CEO and the leader and...
towards the last five years of doing that. The company did very well and we did an amazing job, got amazing results. But I was starting to get bored. We had three regional presidents around the world. They were all doing a great job. There wasn't a fourth region to open.
And I wanted to democratize what we were doing with a tiny number of expensive fee -paying CEOs and cascade it down into the whole organization because I knew that it would have a dramatic impact. And so when I exited that business, I sold it to the management team and I was taken on by one of London's leading PR gurus.
David CM Carter (11:25.358)
who turned me into a brand, The Mentor. And I carried on mentoring clients for about five years and I wrote a book and I did a book tour and a speaking tour and I was on the BBC for three years, doing television and radio. But at the back of my mind, I was thinking, I've got to figure out how to democratize this and make it available to everybody. Because it's that red thread throughout my life. If you have that belief,
that everybody's got a lot more potential than they realize they have or believe they have. And I feel that my whole life purpose is about helping people optimize and actualize their potential. Then if you can do it for the CEO, you can do it for everyone in the business. And so what we've done, we did a big piece of research a few years ago.
And for about five or six years, you couldn't open McKinsey Quarterly, The Economist, PWC, Deloitte, Sanya Report, Pearson's, the Confederation of British Industry, the World Economic Forum. They all wrote reports about what is incorrectly being called the soft skills crisis, which is all the human skills that people need to survive and thrive in the workplace, but they weren't taught at school or college or university.
And this problem affects employers all around the world. It cost the economy billions in lost productivity. And we did this fascinating piece of research where we sort of, we went to 300, just over 300 heads of HR, chief people officers, and said to them, have you heard of this soft skills crisis? And they went, duh, yes. Does it impact your company? Duh, yes.
So exactly what soft skills do your applicants or employees not have that you'd like them to have and they just spewed them out and We ended up with over 800 Soft skills that their applicants and employees didn't have Anyway, there was quite a bit of duplication in that where people expressed the same thing a different way but the fascinating thing was that
David CM Carter (13:49.038)
There was over 300 skills that they called soft skills like Excel spreadsheet modeling and PowerPoint presentation making. And my favorite was trying to explain to the head of HR for a big UK retailer that Python programming isn't a soft skill, it's a technical skill. And what became clear was they'd all got this problem, but they hadn't got a clue how to sort it out because that involved non -technical training, human training and
and they were very good at that, and neither were the colleges or schools that their applicants had come from. And I'd been working with these 54 character qualities for three decades, three and a half decades. So we spent several months mapping the 54 character qualities against the 77 soft skills. So at the end of our research, we went back and said, look, here's the 77 that you all say you want to need and...
lacking and missing, is this correct? And they all signed off on it. So then we said, well, let's show you something new and different. Let's show you how these 54 character qualities map against that. So for example, one of the top five soft skills that they said people weren't very good at was time management. And so we looked at all the courses they sent people on and the quizzes they had to do at the end of the course. And we figured out exactly why it never worked.
and never made a difference to time management. It's because they didn't teach people how to become accountable, responsible, disciplined, organized, efficient and reliable. And if you taught people to be those six character qualities, you'd never need to set them on a time management course. And the same applied to all 77 soft skills, that they were really compilation skills of a number of character qualities. You know,
I could make the world's greatest PowerPoint deck with bells and whistles and smoke screens and mirrors. It could have the best research content, the best diagrams and everything and all of snazzy features of PowerPoint. But if I stand on the stage and I'm not confident or calm or charismatic, guess what? My presentation might be the best in the world, but no one will remember what I said or because, and so,
David CM Carter (16:16.334)
all these companies want to teach people presentation skills, you know, because that's needed for selling and marketing. They all go from these courses how to make a whiz bang PowerPoint deck, but then they're no good at presenting it. So we teach the underpinning human skills against each of those desired soft skills. And the beautiful thing about it is that every baby,
born on the planet was born with the innate ability to be brilliant, all 54 of them. But they got parented out of you, schooled out of you, churched out of you, workplace out of you, whatever. But there isn't a person on the planet who can't quickly learn to be more kind, more compassionate, more collaborative, more analytical, more creative.
more organized, disciplined, reliable, efficient, purposeful. So those 54 characters, everyone's capable of dialing it up somehow. And so our intervention starts off with a 180. You go through the 54 character qualities and you mark them on a one to five scale. This is something I'm already really good at and good as a strength. I'm okay at it. I'm neither good nor bad at it. I'm not that good at it and I'm terrible at it and I need to work on it.
And then you get 10 people to do a 360 who are your friends, family, colleagues, your boss. And then they tell you their ranking. So now the fascination is, ooh, I see myself as needing to work on being organized and so do all of they. So I better work on that as a match. They all see me as collaborative and so do I. So I was a dial that up and coach other people.
But the fascinating ones are, you know, I see myself as pioneering, but no one else does. Well, that's a bit of a problem. And they think I need to work on it. And the flip side of that is they all see me as humorous, but I don't or whatever it is. And just that information about those 54 character quotes is probably the greatest insight into self that anybody's ever had.
David CM Carter (18:44.778)
And you know, the feedback from people is, oh my word, I learned so much about myself. And of course it's all right and they know it's all right. But then the next question is, so what am I gonna do about it? And I've got a recent story which I'll share with you. So we hired a guy in his late 50s in our sales team. He got.
20 plus years of education sales experience. And he just had his first grandchild and he'd been married for 30 years. So every Monday, our whole organization joins a Zoom call, whole of the company. And we get split off into little groups of three or four. And we all share the character quality that we're working on that month, you know, a professional one and a personal one. And it gives you an accountability buddy or two or three.
gives you tools, tips, advice that other people do. Oh, have you tried this? How about that? Whatever. Or, oh, I've noticed the difference already. You've started working on that. Anyway, this chap who joined us, he loved this idea. And so he decided to show his wife how much he appreciated her. He was going to work on being kind to his wife. And because he wanted to hit the ground running and impress his new company and his boss and...
for the previous 15 years in making sales calls and what have you. He booked in typically on an average week about 40 demos. But he knew that he was constantly distracted by his mobile phone pinging off with Slack messages and if he could somehow be more disciplined. So in his little group, a couple of the girls said to him, well, schedule your time, nine o 'clock till.
10 .45, sorry, it's a 10 .15 sales calls, 10 .15 to 10 .30 coffee break, 10 .30 to 11 .45 sales calls, 11 .45 to 12 .00 coffee break. And put your mobile phone in the kitchen next to the coffee machine and check them when you go make a coffee. And so it's not on your desk, it's not pinging and not distracting. And then you can be more disciplined. And then...
David CM Carter (21:08.398)
And he was like, oh, I like that idea, I'll give her that shot. And then the girl said, oh, what are you gonna do to be more kind to your wife? And he said, oh, just silly things like, you know, at nine o 'clock at night, before bed, I'm gonna take the dog around the block for a pee before bedtime and not be nagged and not be asked, I'll just volunteer to do it and get up and do it every night automatically. And on Tuesday nights, I'm gonna take the garbage out.
put for the refuse guys to collect the next morning and not be nagged and I just do it. And I, what was the third one? Oh yeah, see, his wife's dry cleaners was next to his gym so he could pick the tickets up which were next to his car keys and pick her dry cleaning up so she didn't have to make a separate trip into town. Anyway, fast forward the week and he came into the group and they were like, so how'd you get on? And he said, 50 demos booked this week.
That was the most amazing tip. So simple, so easy to do. I've literally improved my productivity by 25%. Simple idea. Brilliant, thank you. Oh, how did it go with being kind with your wife? And he said, well, that went well, but I'll tell you the story. So he said, every Friday night, ever since we've been married, we've always wanted to have like a...
date night and a romantic supper, just the two of us and not go out. And so she typically would come into my office about 6 .30, put a gin and tonic on the table and say, look, supper's at seven, so tidy up your desk, switch your laptop off. And with this particular Friday, she came and put his gin and tonic on the table and put another one over there and sat in the chair. And she said, look, I'm just gonna come straight out with it. Are you having an affair with someone?
And he's like, no, of course I'm not. Why on earth would he say, well, you've taken the dog for a pee every night at nine o 'clock without being nagged, you picked my dry cleaning up and you're taking the garbage out. She said, I just want to know what's going on. He said, no, no, it's Entelechy. I'm working on being kind. And she said, well, whatever drugs they're giving you, that company keep taking them because I like it. But, you know, this was a 58 year old who said, I can't believe in one week of focusing on two character qualities.
David CM Carter (23:32.974)
the dramatic impact that being conscious about those two character qualities has had on my life. You know, like my new boss thinks I'm a sale superstar. And quite frankly, I've done better than I've ever done it before. Simple piece of advice. And so I've got thousands of those stories where people choose one character quality and literally dedicate a week to working on it. And a week later, they can tell a story like I've just told you, like, wow, that really worked.
So it's a quick win. And unlike a personality profile like Myers -Briggs or Color Insights or Disco or whatever, you know, I'm a Capricorn. I was born a Capricorn. I'll always be a Capricorn. I think I've done Myers -Briggs six or seven times in my 45 year career. I've always been, you know, an INFP and I'm never any different. As if you can't change, but actually each of these 54 character quotes, you can change and get results and dramatic.
changes in a week. And those are the things going right to the back of the conversation at the beginning. They're the things that made that company outperform the other one by 27 times. It was that focus on performance and culture. And so what I've done is I've bought those 54 character qualities that I've worked with for 35.
years as IP, fused and mapped it onto the 77 soft skills that employers are saying they can't find applicants or employees with, and realized that if you have a company that's here now in terms of their character competence, and they know they want to get there, it's A, easy to get there, and B, it will achieve dramatic results for them when they do.
Kyle (25:29.175)
I think that's really fascinating. And especially the way that you've kind of turned it, because I think a lot of us focus many times on... It's almost on some of the outputs of the thing. So, you know, I want to be more... We maybe almost are thinking about it in reverse of what you're talking about. Like, about, you know, maybe organizing my desk or, you know, timeboxing things. I'm going to do timeboxing on my calendar.
but it's not necessarily about I'm going to be more disciplined in my time management. And so by focusing on the character quality, you're then implementing things to help drive that. So it's not so much about here's like the tasks that I'm doing, those are part of it, but they're part of like a bigger strategy of working on a character trait. How have you seen the...
David CM Carter (26:26.126)
Yeah, we call it the B, we call it the B do become framework. Who have I got to be? I'm better at being to do that thing to, to, to get that outcome. Um, and of course, you know, part two of the story I've just told you is in three months later, this chap said, I've carried on being disciplined in everything I do. And it's had.
Kyle (26:30.143)
Mm -hmm.
David CM Carter (26:55.246)
this result in my football team coaching. It's had this result in my relationship with my daughter. It's had this relationship to benefit with my mum. It's had this outcome in my hobby and what have you. And so the 54 character qualities, you know, if you worked on being kind and disciplined, guess what? They probably show up in a dozen others soft skills. And so,
they're transferable from one soft skill to another. But I also think as well, it's that who do I need to be to achieve that goal that my boss wants or that I want or my colleagues want or my customers want?
you know, maybe I need to be more empathetic and listen more. Maybe I need to be more collaborative. May I be, I need to be more creative. There's lots. It's like my son, Tom, he makes me laugh. He says, dad, the answer to everything's in this pack of cards. You know, we've got all the 54 character qualities and, and he, he says, right today, I was thinking about how I need to solve this problem. Well, I need to be more practical.
adaptable and authentic. And he looks through the cards and is like, which one of these do I need to dial up today to solve this issue? And tomorrow or this afternoon will be another thing he's working on different and I go, oh no, now I need to be resilient and analytical and reliable or whatever it is. And so it just gives him a framework. What is it, who do I need to be right now to dial up?
we have exercised, actualised more potential than I would have done if I hadn't been conscious about it.
Kyle (28:53.015)
Yeah, I think that that's a really great way to be thinking about it and to be looking at it. You mentioned something in there as well, and I'm curious, do we as people, in your experience, are we good at seeing these things in ourselves most of the time or some of the time? Or how often do we need that outside perspective? As you've done a lot of these assessments and as people have kind of...
written down or assess themselves as far as their strengths and weaknesses and then how to other people do that as well. How often is there alignment and misalignment and what have you found as you've done this?
David CM Carter (29:35.118)
It's a very, very fascinating question and answer. So most people will be able to go through the 180 and think, no, I don't think I'm very good at that. And, oh, I'm really good at that. And I'm okay at that. They might think about it for a while. No, probably. But then when they get the feedback from everybody else,
It's really interesting because now this is how you show up in the world. You might think you're collaborative, but if no one else in your team does, you're gonna have to adjust your TVs and dial into another frequency. But also, you know,
I don't see myself as very wise, but literally the entire company does. So maybe I need to own that and step into it and be proud of it.
And I think that there's a sort of combination of, and it really is a fascinating combination of, I think I probably knew that, but I'm not sure I wanted to admit it to myself or others, because I wasn't sure if my observation was correct or not. But once you get that 360 feedback, it's like, they all think I'm crap at this, I think I'm crap at this, I definitely need to work on it.
or they will see it as a strength and so do I, so I'll have to lean into it a bit more. But it's those two fringe cases, which is, you know, I thought I was humorous, but no one else seems to think. And I remember when I did mine a few years ago, one of the things that I genuinely like to think of myself as is, you know, quite well balanced, sort of physical, mental, spiritual, emotional person.
David CM Carter (31:32.334)
And literally nobody saw me as that. And when I talked to my assessors, like, why didn't you give me a score on that? They're like, you're a workaholic. You haven't got a clue about balance. You know, you take the dog for a walk. That's about it. And...
And I sort of thought, I think I probably knew that, but it's a bit revealing when 27 people who did my assessment, like here it is David, you can't ignore this, you can't. And so I think some of them you know, some of them you suspected, and some of them you didn't really want to admit to. But I think when you get it all together, it's like, it, it, it, it, it, it,
distinctly raises your self -awareness, really helps with your self -awareness. And I think it empowers you. It's like, okay, everyone thinks I'm good at this. Actually, I thought I was pretty good at it too, so I'm gonna lean into this. And in fact, I can coach others on it. You know, I'm rubbish at this. They all think I'm rubbish. I'm gonna go and ask for some help. And look, I got it and a week later, I'd already shifted the dial on one of them. And so,
If we all, and I mean all of us, part of what we need is love, acknowledgement and appreciation. When people say you're so good at this, you should do more of it and help other people, it's like, oh, you know, actually I'm pretty good at that and I'd like to help. So I think it not only gives you the self -awareness, but this whole tool gives you the ability to lean into things, dial things up and,
like my son does, you know, be more conscious. You know, if he hasn't got the cards, he's got one of the IntelliKey Explorer app. It's like, I'll go in and have a look at it. And my son and daughter -in -law, I did an interesting exercise with them, a bit like that game show Mr. and Mrs. I said, OK, if I asked Tom whether he thinks this is a strength or a growth opportunity, what's he going to say? And what do you think? Where do you think he actually is? So let's compare.
David CM Carter (33:47.95)
what you think he's gonna say. And this was a year or a couple of years ago and they were sitting at my back garden one summer. And they realized, I mean, they're so in love and they're fantastic couple together, but they realized they could learn so much about each other just from talking about half a dozen character qualities and how they saw them and what they saw in each other and what their own perception, the other's perception, the self perception was.
It's a great conversation starter.
Kyle (34:24.673)
Yeah, I can imagine. And it feels like one of those things that is so pertinent both professionally and personally, kind of like you were mentioning, to take some of those character qualities and apply them in the work that we're doing, but then also how does that apply to our personal lives and other things that we're doing? As you've been working through this and doing many of these things and applying these character qualities,
to some of the skills, how have you found that employers, for example, or businesses are looking at this in your work? Because there obviously is that huge focus on soft skills, which if they take a step back, you can map, like you said, to a lot of these character qualities. Has that been a gap for many?
employers or many businesses in their thinking and how has been kind of the reception as you've been working with companies to kind of almost take a step back and say it's not just about the skills, it's about some of these deeper things that as you work on them, you know, can also work on the skills. What's that been like?
David CM Carter (35:40.91)
Have you ever heard of the five wise technique?
Kyle (35:45.687)
Yes.
David CM Carter (35:47.31)
You know, so why is that important? Tell me more. Oh, so why is that important? Tell me more. So why does that matter? Tell me more. And you eventually always get to the real problem, not the presenting problem. And so soft skills to me is the presenting problem. You know, we don't have people who turn up to work on time, so we need time management skills. Is it because...
of another reason that they don't turn up to work on time or is it they just lack time management skills? Why is that? How's that? Tell me more. Why is that? And ultimately, you know, you go and talk to a typical CEO or an HR director and they'll say, oh, we need this skill and this skill and da da da da. But ultimately, I think it boils down to two things, which are really a flip side of the same coin.
and this has got worse and worse and worse over the last 10 years for employers, is that, and I've got lots and lots of research into this, is that employers are like, we just don't get the same productivity out of the thousand people on our workforce in terms of sales per employee, profits per employee that we got 10 years ago. And,
And the flip side of that coin is they say, we don't have engagement like we used to. Uh, you know, and people tell you stories, you know, I always made sure I was the first in the office and the last to leave because that was something that was important to the boss. And I knew I'd get a promotion and now everybody turns up late and everybody leaves early. It's like, it's always like, no one cares about. And everyone talks about how they want to have their career developed, but they don't appear.
to show up with all of the everyday work -ready leadership skills that you would want to see associated with a manager or whatever. And so many companies have what we call accidental managers. This person's been around for two years and they're thinking of leaving because they haven't been promoted, so they get promoted. But they themselves don't have all the work -ready skills that the employer really would look for in them. And now they've got 10 people who haven't got them either.
David CM Carter (38:11.438)
And so if you talk to employers about what are the challenges you've got with your people, you know, what are you doing to someone? I just show them one page in a screen share, the 54 character qualities. I do this all the time and say, choose half a dozen. If we could get everyone in your organization to be brilliant, just at those half a dozen, we could shift the dial in terms of your performance.
And they're like, oh my God, we want this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, stop, that's 10. Let's stop at 10. If we got everyone in the organization to be brilliant at just those 10 in a year's time, tell me what would happen. Oh, our sales will go up 30%, our margins would improve by 20%, we're slashing half our first year retention problem, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. It's like, okay, well that adds up to like,
8 million of extra profitability, this intervention's only gonna cost you 400 ,000 over the next 12 months to get you to that point. You get a 20 times ROI. So if we get you to that point, and let's call that 100%, peak performance, what score would you give yourselves today? And no one has ever given themselves more than 60%. It's normally 45, 50, 55%.
It's like, okay, well, you can see that the delta between the 55 % score you've given yourself today and the score you'd like to achieve by dialing up 10 character qualities in a year can make you 12 million more dollars on your bottom line. It's like, what's not to like about this? And all of the things that the people have to do.
are as simple as the stories I shared with you earlier on about managing their time better, being disciplined in their phone. And so they look at this and say, where have you guys been for the last 20 years? It's like, this is really simple. We can figure out what people have got as character at the quality strengths. We can figure out where we need them to get to and they can agree to that. And then if they develop one a month,
David CM Carter (40:32.27)
or every two months and they did about six over the course of a year and they really did become strengths and we only got six of them done in a year and it took us two years to get all 10. That would be a really amazing and that goes right back to the beginning of the conversation. That's what companies do who outperform their competitors and attract better quality staff, win more business, make more margins, blah blah.
Kyle (40:56.695)
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
David CM Carter (40:57.742)
So I finally, after all these years, managed to figure out a way to democratize it for the whole organization. And, you know, there's lots of conversations that we have with organizations like, oh, we want our people to live our values and be connected to our vision and mission or estimate our purpose. And they're not. And so then when we look at the...
character, quality, competence of their workforce, we can figure out which ones need to be dialed up to achieve that match with their vision and values and all that exciting stuff. So it really, you know, I finally, after all these years, figured out a way to democratize it and make it quite accessible and exciting and fun for individuals. Because if you work out how to be more kind or disciplined or analytical or purposeful,
It impacts every aspect of your life and it underpins a number of the other soft skills as well. So you get double trouble bubble for it.
Kyle (42:00.951)
Yeah, absolutely. If I wanted to like personally get started on something like this, like identifying some of the things for me, is there a way to do something like that?
David CM Carter (42:13.798)
Our business model is set up for an enterprise with 200 plus employees, but anybody can go to our website and do a free character assessment.
Kyle (42:28.439)
Awesome. And what is that website?
David CM Carter (42:32.418)
www .enteleki .academy
Kyle (42:39.863)
Okay, perfect. And we'll put that link in the show notes as well. Well, David, this has been a really, really great conversation. I feel like we could continue going down some of these paths for quite some time because I find it fascinating this, again, the whole idea of how do we reach our potential, kind of like you were saying, and focusing on these character qualities. I do have a couple of wrap -up questions for you. Please. Yep.
David CM Carter (43:05.454)
Sorry, can I just, can I just rest pause one second?
David CM Carter (43:12.878)
I want to change something you just said, which is really important. It's not how do we reach our potential. It's how do we move towards our potential. One day at a time, one character quality at a time, one person at a time. Because, you know, I wrote a book 10 years ago about becoming the best version of yourself and...
Kyle (43:16.375)
Please.
David CM Carter (43:37.218)
on my book speaking to us, I was like, oh David, are you the best version of yourself? And I said, I am every single day. And they're like, oh, isn't that a bit arrogant? And I said, no, I've still got a long way to go to get to the ultimate version of me. But as long as I'm trying every day to be the best version of myself, then that's the best I've got to so far. So don't worry about what it eventually is, just worry about being a better version of yourself today, the best version of yourself.
is always trying to be a better version of yourself.
Kyle (44:09.719)
Yeah, I think that's a great, great distinction to make there. So appreciate that. As far as the things that we've talked about, before we do wrap up, anything that we didn't get a chance to talk about that you'd like to add?
David CM Carter (44:29.614)
I think that...
No, I think that whether it's as a friend, as a partner, as a parent, as a grandparent, as a boss, as a colleague, an employer, whatever, everybody loves being acknowledged and appreciated. And so, you know, if you notice something that someone else tells well, you can say, oh, you're so collaborative or you're so creative or so analytical or whatever. I, I,
I'm going to learn from you how to do that. And equally if they say, oh, well, you're very this, I could learn from you. It's like, it's a really nice bonding way to have a conversation with a colleague, a peer, a friend, a family member about how can we both become a better version of ourselves and in doing so, support and help each other. Because the fun to me is the getting there, not the getting, it's the journey to get there, not the destination.
I've got no idea what the best version of me looks like in 10 years time. But you know, I've got a good idea what it should look like today and I'm going to work on it today. And if everybody did that, the world would be a happier place.
David CM Carter (50:18.286)
Very good, sir.
Kyle (50:19.669)
All right. Well, again, David, this has been a great conversation. Appreciate all of your insights. And I think this has been most excellent. So we will put all of the links in the show notes and appreciate everyone for everyone listening.
David CM Carter (50:36.91)
Thank you very much for inviting me on the show.
Kyle (50:39.991)
Thank you again.