The Initiative Edge

Anita Brick: Hi, this is Anita Brick and welcome to CareerCast at Chicago Booth. To help you advance in your career. Today, we're delighted to be speaking with Joshua Spodek. Josh, when I read your bio, I couldn't believe that all these things have been done by one person. So I'm going to give them the really short version. And as we go through it more will be revealed I'm sure. He's got a PhD and an MBA, a three time TED speaker, number one bestseller author of Initiative, which is what we're going to talk about today. Leadership, step by step, host of the award-winning Leadership and the Environment podcast and professor at NYU. He holds a PhD in astrophysics and an MBA from Columbia and helped launch a satellite, having emerged from some of the roughest neighborhoods in Philadelphia.

He left academia to found a venture to market an invention that showed animated images to subway riders in between stations. He teaches and coaches leadership and entrepreneurship at NYU and Columbia Business School. He’s spoken at Harvard, University of Chicago recently, Princeton, West Point, Google, IBM, the New York Academy of Science, Children's Art Society, and many, many other places.

So thank you so much. I know you're a super busy guy. Initiative is a great book. What became very clear to me is that even if the intention initially maybe was entrepreneurs, it applies way more broadly than that and way more broadly than even career or the professional side. But maybe you can very briefly define initiative for us based on how you personally define initiative.

Joshua Spodek: I want to start by distinguishing it from entrepreneurship. Used to be entrepreneurship was not just a commercial thing. To be entrepreneurial meant you'd start something. I found, though, that when I talked about entrepreneurship, it's very difficult for people to not think about Silicon Valley engineers working in the garage, venture backed IPO bound. It's a super set initiative, is to take initiative. It's to start something, and it's a set of social and emotional skills that if you have them, you don't have to wait for others to think of things for you. You can create projects.

My book, The Core of It: What People Value Most, is a set of exercises that give you skills, experiences, and beliefs of an effective initiator. You may use that in your existing company to get promoted, to get more authority, to get more responsibility, to starting a division. But you can use it in life to organize your community, to start habits in your life.

Anita Brick: Okay, good. We'll start with someone alumnus from Booth and he said: “I have been in the workforce for a very long time, and I've had more than a few obstacles. If it is true that you don't need an idea, resources or passion which you talk about in the book, what do I need and where do I start?”

Joshua Spodek: It's not what you know. It's not whom you know. It's do you have the skills and experiences and beliefs to connect with people who have access to the resources that you want? Most people who build companies or sell widgets. They don't actually build a widget themselves. They amass resources and they find ways to bring people into a team. And other people do their elements of the team. If you can create something and present it to people in a way that they feel like, oh, I want to work on this, or I want to be a customer of yours. I want to be a supplier of yours. I want to be an employee of yours. I want to be part of your team in some way. Then you will create a team that is able to do these things.

Very rarely, very few big achievements or things that people want to do are solo things. What community can you connect with around you? The outcome of someone who does the exercises in this book? Partly it's you're going to have a project that's going to be a really cool project. Maybe you'll have a company that's running or you'll have a nonprofit that's running, or you'll have a passion in your life. That's a hobby, that's part of it. The other thing is that you will create a community around you, often containing the most valuable people are some of the more valuable people in the community you want to be in, and they will view you as a peer, and they'll have a vested interest in your success because they will see in your success their success. So they'll help you. This is what to me initiative is about more than anything else, is creating this community around you of supportive people. Those connections, you can start from scratch.

Anita Brick: Okay, so in the world that we live in right now, an MBA student asked this question because he is in a mode where his company is contracting. He has an idea for a project that ultimately will need resources. And what she said is: “Thank you, Josh, I'm not interested in starting a business, but I would like to create some things in my company. That said, we are in a cost-cutting mode with furloughs and layoffs. What are a couple of things I can do when the resources just aren't available right now? And I really don't want to wait.”

Joshua Spodek: There's a couple stories that come to mind. The opening story in the book of Rafael. He came to me for coaching and he had an MBA or has an MBA. He worked in a small company. He wanted to be a decision maker. He wanted to help them, you know, make strategic decisions, not just to be a functionary. And he would come to them with projects and say, here's a project. I think it's great. And he'd make these proposals that there's no way you could say no to them. And they would say, well, we'll think about it. And they would never think about it or they would never get back to him.

And he came to me because he said, Josh, I realize that I want to be a decision maker. It's never going to happen in a company. I have to start something on my own. He and I were working on what he had asked me to do, so I was coaching on what he asked me for, which is to develop a new company. He was also using the skills that we were developing and how to approach funding sources and how to approach suppliers. He was going back to his bosses. The old way he was doing it was basically, here's a proposal, take it or leave it. They would evaluate it. And it's always safer to, you know, to wait. He was instead going to them earlier in the process and saying, here's a problem. Do you see this problem, too? They’d say yeah, and you get them to share their experience of the problem. You know, he'd say, well, here's something like we could possibly do this. What do you think about that? He'd ask for advice instead of judgment. And at some point along the way they said, this project is yours. You know it, you understand it. And it's a proposal he'd suggested before.

When he gave him a proposal and asked for judgment. They would judge negatively when he involved in the process. They shared their problems. When they understood that he got their problems, and he presented himself as a problem solver. That would involve them. What he wanted was responsibility, accountability, resources to get the job done. And that's what he got. What that requires more than anything else is, part two is for other people to share the problems with you. Part one is for you to speak and communicate in ways that they feel comfortable sharing those problems.

Anita Brick: Right? But what if there aren't resources available? Where do you start when the resources may not be available at this particular time?

Joshua Spodek: That's a problem. That problem is something that you could be in charge of, is how to get those resources, how to solve the problem without getting those resources.

It reminds me of another, another guy came to me. He talked about how I forget if it was his son or daughter, but he had a child, their high school had a summer program or a summer assignment. Every student had to do something in service of others over the summer. And I guess in the fall they would write it up. A bunch of the parents were complaining to the school because of the virus. People can't get out and therefore we should put this on hold for the summer. This struck me as totally backward.

There are more problems in the world. That means there's more opportunity to help people. There's lots of ways to find problems and to help solve these problems. And to say that because you're limited doesn't mean that those problems aren't there. Once you get in the mindset–alright,  I'm going to give you one of the most important things is that when a valuable person tells you their problems, and when I say valuable person, a decision maker or someone with access to resources. And this is for people who are looking for jobs, it doesn't have to be. It could be people looking for promotions, for more responsibility. When a valuable person in a field, a decision maker, someone with resources tells you their problem–problems. There's a technical term for that in business. The technical term for when a valuable person, someone with resources, a decision maker tells you their problems, the technical term is job offer.

Anita Brick: Right, you talk about that in the book.

Joshua Spodek: When you don't know that, a lot of people will just hear someone share their problems and they're like, oh, you're burdening me with your problems. Someone who knows how to respond to that and come back and, you know, the book explains effective ways to respond so that they engage you and say, aha, and start considering you for a position. Then you start wanting people to show their problems. You start behaving in ways so that and communicating in ways. So they want to share these things with you. And then opportunities are all over the place.

Anita Brick: Okay. So you talk about that. The locus of change–I’m totally onboard with this–is within you rather than the barriers that exist. One of the MBA students asked, he said: “Hi Josh, you talk about how a person's biggest hurdles aren't external but internal. I'm trying to sync that up in my mind in a world that has huge barriers and a whole bunch of problems, especially today.”

Joshua Spodek: You know, I wish that people could meet me from a long time ago. I have a PhD in physics and I got to tell you, physics does not teach you social emotional skills. It teaches you how to find the mass of an electron and how to build satellites and things like that. But if you met me before, I had no ability to connect with people. I had the opposite of leadership. I had the opposite of ability to get people to do things. Tey would say logically make what you're saying makes sense. But I do the opposite. In fact–

Anita Brick: What was the problem? I mean, what was the problem with you that you identified internally and that you transformed?

Joshua Spodek: The way I put it? I was lecturing. Lecturing, I think, is a very ineffective way of teaching. It's I have knowledge. You don't. When you have the knowledge, you'll agree with me. Not how it works. You know, we learn through experience and we learn from doing things. We learn from challenging ourselves in our weaker areas.

Anita Brick: But what I want to know is what was that moment? Or those series of moments where you were actually willing to shift? Because sometimes people who lecture and tell people what to do or they are unappreciative and they just like, try really hard, it's not happening. They blame everybody else. What allowed you and when were you able to then say, wait a minute, it's not them, it's me. I need to change. I see how things are today. I get that very clearly. But people have a hard time owning it and shifting it. So how did you own it and how did you shift it?

Joshua Spodek: I can give you many stories. Ask for more detail if you want to hear me cry. The big one was that I had this idea for a company for a technology in 96, co-founded the company in 98, got a funding in 99. Got our first big contracts in 2000-2001. Went live in 2001. Then September 11th hit. 2003 I squeezed out of the company. I mean, the writing was on the wall in 2002. I built this company from scratch–cobuilt it. There was another co-founder. I put everything I had into it, and I was out of the company. In fact, even after I was out of the company, I still felt so attached to it that I would still come into the office until they moved to a new office, they simply didn't give you a key to the office. And that's like my big out. So I'm serious. Like, if you want me to cry, I can tell the story about being unaccepted in my own company.

Anita Brick: I don't necessarily want you to cry, but you know, we can go through a lot of pain and still blame others. You could have said, wow, what jerks. They move. They didn't give me a key. I'm going to get back at them. What was it that allowed you to own it and say, I think I have a part in this, and I am going to take action to transform myself from the inside.

Joshua Spodek: Leadership classes in business school made a big difference. I didn't know that you could change yourself. At the beginning, I thought, you know, Martin Luther King was Martin Luther King. I'm not. So I can't do what you did. The classes taught me that that was possible.

Now I want to distinguish also, the classes that I took in business school were structured on lecture, case study, reading and writing papers. So that opened the door. Also during business school I did my first class play. It's called Follies, you know, song and dance kind of comedy sketch stuff. No one's expecting quality acting, luckily, because I didn't have any quality acting. And at the time that I was learning to be open to emotions and increasing my self-awareness in that area, I also, by chance, happened to have a chance to act on it. And going up on stage in front of 500 friends and peers, classmates, and also a lot of people I didn't know. I mean, I was ready to puke before going up on stage. But the elation that I felt after, that told me there's a way out and that way out through anxiety, through challenging, you know, really gut-wrenching feelings leads to tremendous emotional reward and just the launchpad for so much more.

Then later, I took acting classes to follow up on that in part, and that just took it to a whole other level. And I realized that it wasn't just learning that you can do these things, but actually doing them. There's a big difference between reading about, say, emotional intelligence and increasing your emotional intelligence. And I'm no Dalai Lama, but I'm way far ahead of where I was before.

Anita Brick: It's kind of remarkable because sometimes people, all of the change that they see is other people changing to meet their needs rather than the other way around. It takes so much courage. It takes guts to be willing to put yourself on the line and say, wait a minute, maybe this is me. When you look around, and even when I think about the process that is in the book, a lot of it is very similar to that. It is okay, you're going to challenge yourself in new ways, and if it doesn't work out, if you get feedback that you don't like, say thank you very much in a polite way and know who you are and just know that the change is even to get your project or your company to the place where it needs to be for you based on your own terms, has to come through the evolution or even internal revolution within you is remarkable. Because it gives people power to accomplish things when the world is swirling around with so many obstacles and so many barriers that say, forget it, you can't do it. You are being an example of that is pretty remarkable. But it leads to another question that was submitted by–

Joshua Spodek: Can I comment on that before?

Anita Brick: Please go right ahead. And then I have a follow-on question.

Joshua Spodek: The transition, the transformation you're talking about. In traditional, what we call traditional education, is rare because mostly we're giving people facts and hoping that they write papers that are more analytical and so forth. In other fields, that's normal. If someone wants to act or to sing, or to play musical instrument or to play sport or goes into the military, they fundamentally transform, give them experiences. And my model for education, if it's not lecture case study, what is it? It's teaching the basics through practice. These early exercises have to be simple, and you have to give very specific instruction. And when you get the basics, the nuts and bolts down, then you can start emerging. In my words, it's you got to say no to a lot of good things to have a great life. And in the language of the book, most people, we emerge from a school system and a culture that promotes lots of different things. There's lots of shiny objects around. There's lots of things that we can be interested in, but most importantly, school tells us this is what to study. This is how to study it. This is to show how you've learned it. And so history is important. Geography is important. You know, all the subjects are important. It tells you maybe what values are, but it doesn't help you figure out what your values are. It tells you what to value. So we have these atrophied muscles of knowing what matters to us. Low self-awareness.

So when I teach at NYU, everyone has to start a project, but at least half the people they switch at some point, and when they switch, they like the second thing they do more than the first, otherwise they wouldn't switch. Why would they pick something they don't like at first? Is it because they wanted to do something they don't like? I think it's more that they didn’t know what they wanted. They knew what their parents wanted. They knew what was popular. They knew what they thought might make money or might get them a good grade. But those don't necessarily mean that they value them.

So one of the things that happens when you learn the skills of initiative, you learn that you can make something happen, something that you started that didn't exist before. You can make it happen. And when you start seeing it happen, you get this feeling of like, wow, this can work. And then you think, wait a minute, do I want it to work? Do I want to start something that is, that's going to lead me into this area? And a lot of times the answer is no. Then you start also realizing, wait, if I can make something work, you become more sensitive to other passions that you weren't aware of, and you start distinguishing between what to you is a passing fancy, what to you as a hobby that might endure for a while, and what's truly a life passion that you could do for years and years. And you'll happily decline doing other things.

My leadership in the environment podcast, bringing leadership to the environment. The number of things that I used to love that I now say no to happily because this is so much more valuable to me, and I hope to the rest of the world, it's no problem for me to say no to other things. The first thing when you find out it's a passing fancy, you still keep doing it because you still have to keep developing the skills with what you got until something takes over from that. And something will.

Anita Brick: One of the alums made a point about switching, and he said: “In your book you talk about switching projects as something you see as helpful. I am a master switcher. What advice would you have for someone who switches often and maybe too often?”

Joshua Spodek: This is natural, you know, if you feel bad about it, I hope you don't. I hope you feel like you're one of roughly 7.7 billion others just like you. Here I cannot offer a shortcut. I can only say if you do the exercises, it will happen. I'm not aware of another path that does that. I mean, meditation and mindfulness exercises will also help you with these things to calm yourself down and help you understand your priorities. I believe that the book's exercises are the most effective way to settle out for yourself the passing fancies, things that seem really interesting in the moment, but they're not going to last. And it turns out that there's not that many categories of those things. So there's things that maybe your parents want you to do. There's things that make the news. There's things that are trendy. You know, we live in a world that promotes, hey, look at me. Look at me, listen to me, listen to me. Not so much reflect. Act. My goal is to transform you into the person you want to be. I want to transform you as a person. I want to develop you to the next level. That's what the exercises do.

Anita Brick: Do you start with people in a way where they are–they can start, and then you move a little bit further and a little bit further and a little bit further? This is, in a way, in the midst of all the challenges that we face as a society right now. This is a very comforting way to approach this, because it allows you to start where you are and build an experiment, and there may be some iteration around it. I mean, I'm assuming there is for most people. And when you get to that point, the switch does flip when it becomes less about you creating whatever you're creating and more about the others who will benefit from whatever you're creating.

Joshua Spodek: I'd like to take credit for this way of teaching, but I'm using what's been done for thousands of years. It's just the exercises are different.

Anita Brick: We all build on what came before. Do you have time for a couple more questions?

Joshua Spodek: Yeah, I love questions from people who've read and digested and reflected. Those are the most valuable ones. The ones I love the most are after they finish them, what comes next? What do I do?

Anita Brick: Yeah, well, maybe we'll do another. So an alum said: “How have you seen students in quotes of any age express their appreciation effectively for the people with whom they have reached out?”

Joshua Spodek: Yeah. How do you express appreciation? The most effective way to show appreciation is all these people. You're generally asking advice from them, and when people give advice, they want to know how it went. And so if you go back and tell them, this is what I did, and here's how it went. Maybe it failed, maybe it went very well. It doesn't matter for them as long as you tried and you give them the appreciation of you took their advice to heart and acted on it. So if you come back and said, here's what I understood, you said for me to do, here's what I did. Here are the results. I wonder if you could tell me a way that I could do better. I wonder if you could tell me. Is this what you had in mind? That's the best appreciation you can show. I listened to you. I did my best to act on it. And I'd like to listen to you more.

You can say thank you. You can buy them gifts. But I think that will pale in comparison to you spent your time and attention and your relationships on acting on it. Now, it may be that you couldn't act on it for some reason. Go back and tell them. Here's what I understood you to say. I tried to figure out how to do it. I just couldn't figure out how to do it. That's what you did. Then they'll probably give you more advice to how they think that if you do it, it'll improve your life. So they're going to want to help.

Anita Brick: I love that. That's great. When I work with students and one of the things I suggest that they do, because people want to know, was the time that I gave to you worth it to you? That is right on point.

Just to conclude, and I know that things revolve around the ten exercises that you have laid out, which are very powerful. What are the next three things that you would advise someone to do who's listening today to take action on? And let's assume that they have the book. They're reading the book, they're doing the exercises. What are the three things that would go beyond that?

Joshua Spodek: You know, I thought about this a bunch. I don't want to be coy, but practice, practice, practice. One of my favorite videos on all of the internet that I've ever seen. It's a video of LeBron James. It's a one hour video of him practicing with his coach–a coach or trainer. It may be for others one of the most boring videos on the internet. I don't think they even talk. He stretches a bit. He does a few jump shots. He does a few strength exercises. I've watched LeBron James play. He does his crazy spin moves. He does things that look ballet-like. In a finals game, I think you got to watch this play. He jumps up to pass it to someone, but in the time that he jumps, the defender covers that person. So he's up in the air holding the ball. No one's open and he has to get rid of the ball before he lands and he can't dribble it. He throws the ball against the backboard, catches his own rebound and gets the basket.

And the interviews of this afterward. And people say that's the sort of thing you do in high school on the parking lot. That's not something you do in finals with other NBA players. He didn't plan that. He jumped up and that's what happened. Like that's what he had in the moment. There was no time to think. You don't fall back on what someone told you to do there. You fall back on what you've practiced. There's no way to practice. What do you do when you jump up in the air? The defender covers the guy, going to pass it to you. You know that's a particular situation that you can never prepare specifically that situation, but you practice the basics. When that situation arises the people who practiced the most, with the most heart. They are the ones who rise and shine in situations like that. If you look for situations like that, they're really hard to come by.

But if you practice enough, you'll get them and so practice, practice, practice what happens? I mean, right now we haven't done the exercises, but the exercises of asking valuable people for advice, what I mean by practice is ask more valuable people for advice, as I'm sure you remember in the exercise it says, end those conversations with two questions. Is there anything I didn't think to ask that's worth bringing up. Now, if you ask that with your family and friends, they're probably not going to help you very much because they're not valuable people in the field. When you ask someone valuable in the field, a lot of times you answer that question. It's going to blow your mind.

That's not what you want to be practicing it. That's what you want to be so skilled at. It. It's a natural question for you to ask. That means you've asked your family and friends many times.

The other question to ask is, is there anyone you could put me in touch with who could help me in this too? Again, if you're asking someone valuable for the first time, you've never asked that question of anyone before, you’re going to get really nervous and you probably won't ask it. But if you've asked that question many, many times with many people familiar with, then we'll ask the other person. Maybe you'll feel a bit of flutter, butterflies in your stomach, but you'll ask and you get an answer. Eventually it becomes natural. When you talk to important people, you ask them to put you in touch with other important people and it flows. The Nobel Prize winner that I got on my podcast was not the Nobel Prize winner that I asked. That person wasn't available. But that one thing led to another. In the camaraderie of Nobel Prize winners, the one who lives near me, the logistics worked out. I couldn't have planned that. But had I started asking for connections there, I would have been too scared.

Anita Brick: Thank you so very much. I really, really appreciate your making the time. You are very, very humble and at the same time you are super confident in knowing who you are and what you stand for. So thank you for sharing all of that and more with us today. And I'm just very appreciative that you made time.

Joshua Spodek: Well, I want to thank you and the Booth community because the questions came from a place of reflection. And having sampled the stuff, that means that's people taking initiative. And I respond to initiative. I respond to passion. And you and the Booth community have shown you that. And so it was, how can I not bring my A-game after you guys brought your A-game?

Anita Brick: I appreciate that, and there are a ton of things on your site which is actually your name, which is Joshua Spodek. Joshuaspodek.com. There are lots of really wonderful things and downloads and all different kinds of opportunities there. So please check it out. And Josh, thanks again.

Joshua Spodek: Anita, thank you very much.

Anita Brick: And thank you all for listening. This is Anita Brick with CareerCast at Chicago Booth. Keep advancing.