How to Live and Lead in the 21st Century

ANNOUNCER: Welcome to Creating Wealth with Jason Hartman! During this program, Jason is going to tell you some really exciting things that you probably haven’t thought of before, and a new slant on investing: fresh new approaches to America’s best investment that will enable you to create more wealth and happiness than you ever thought possible. Jason is a genuine, self-made multi-millionaire who not only talks the talk, but walks the walk. He’s been a successful investor for 20 years, and currently owns property in 11 states and 17 cities. This program will help you follow in Jason’s footsteps on the road to financial freedom. You really can do it! And now, here’s your host, Jason Hartman, with the complete solution for real estate investors.

JASON HARTMAN: Welcome to the Creating Wealth show. This is your host Jason Hartman, and this is episode number three hundred and fifty, and as you regular listeners know, this is a 10th episode, so we go off topic and talk about personal development rather than strict real estate investing and economic stuff. However, in our intro today, I’ve got a few things to talk about, the first of which is to wish you all a happy Thanksgiving. In North America this is Thanksgiving, so I want to wish you all a happy Thanksgiving and remind all the people around the world in 154 countries listening to our show, this is a good time to reflect in general, even if you don’t celebrate Thanksgiving. Just count your blessings and remember, we have a lot to be thankful for. Especially if we can listen to this show, that we can have computers and be connected to the world, regardless of our level on the socioeconomic pyramid of life, we all have a lot to be thankful for. So happy Thanksgiving to you. And I just wanted to start off by talking a little bit today about that big economic powerhouse in the US, and that great place to invest in income property, and that is the good old state of Texas, the Lone Star State. And I’m looking at a Time Magazine article from October 28th here, just a few weeks ago, and it’s got Texas on the cover, and it talks about the United States of Texas. Why the Lone Star State is America’s future, and how great the business model of Texas is. And that business model basically is low taxes, business-friendly environment, and how it’s attracting so many people to that now. I want to mention something about that. When we talk about different markets around the country, as I’ve mentioned before, it’s not just about the marketplace. It’s also about the team that we have in that market. The provider we have. There are markets that we want to be in, but we don’t have a good team. There are markets we’ve been in where our team—well, they’ve disappointed us, frankly. That’s like, if you work at Apple computer, and gosh those people, what’s that—Foxconn? That’s their manufacturing source in China. And if they don’t get the product out quickly enough, or the product has defects or problems, well, they’re disappointed too. Well, we have disappointments in our business. So, it’s not just about the marketplace. That’s the first thing I want to say. It’s also about the team. In addition to that, this Texas concept is almost kind of a metaphor. Because there are other places that don’t get as much PR that are very, very positive, that are very good markets around the country, that are almost place—there’s my dog Coco coming up with her toys. When she hears me talking she strolls up and thinks it’s time to play. She must think there’s someone else here in the room with me. No there’s not. So if you hear the dog, that’s her in the background. So this is kind of a metaphor really, for just generally business-friendly areas throughout the country. So, it applies not only to Texas, but since the article is about Texas, I will talk to you specifically about some amazing things that they pointed out in this article. And that is migration. As real estate investors, we always want to think about something called the path of progress. Now, it’s debatable, the concept of progress, whether that means people moving into places is really progress, okay, because it doesn’t always mean that necessarily. But in this context, it does. We want to look at where people are leaving—the places with a bleak future—and the poster child for this is the state of Michigan, of course, and specifically the metro area of Detroit. And we want to look at where people are moving to. So, what’s losing business, and what’s gaining business? People are voting with their feet. And they’re not just voting for places like Texas, but they’re voting for other business-friendly and real estate-friendly markets around the US that we recommend. But since the article’s about Texas, let’s look at some interesting comparisons, okay? So, first of all, my home state, the Socialist Republic of California—not last year, but, this is net population migration for 2010-2011, people that left California were almost—about 300 people per day. 94,000 people left the state of California. That’s the net migration loss. And keep in mind, the amazing thing about that is that it includes all the people that are coming to California, especially from south of the border from Mexico, and from other states that are coming to California for the freebies that that state likes to hand out. If you’re wanting to be on the dole, California is a pretty good place to be. So when you add all this up, the net population migration, in and out, is still a loss, for California, of 94,000 people that year. Yet at the very same time, the net migration into Texas is positive by 110,000 people, or 301 people per day. Now, imagine that. 301 people per day moving into a state, what that does to the economy? Now look at Illinois—business unfriendly Illinois. 53,000 people left Illinois. New York State, including of course New York City—96,000 people moving out, yet 301 per day, or 110,000 per year, are moving into Texas. Now, here’s one clue as to why. Of course, we look at business-friendly and we look at tax-friendly, but here is a very, very tangible thing that people think about. The comparison for housing, in terms of what you get, okay? San Francisco: here’s what $300,000 will buy you, okay? You’re going to be amazed when I tell you this. A 210 square foot apartment. Yes, 210 square feet. Now, let’s look at another city. Let’s look at Brooklyn, New York. You get 492 square feet in an apartment there. In San Francisco that’s a 1 bedroom 1 bath, it’s really a studio—I mean, 210 square feet, that’s 10 by 20, that’s like a prison cell, basically. Well, a fairly nice prison cell. But still pretty small. Brooklyn? 492 square feet for $300,000. Arlington, Virginia, you get 604 square feet for $300,000. In Chicago you get 900 square feet for $300,000. Yet in Texas, you get 3,052 square feet for your $300,000. And I say you can actually do better than that. If you look at Indiana, if you look at different parts of Texas that we recommend, you can do even better than 3,052 square feet for $300,000. So it just makes sense. You can see why people are moving there. And quoting from the article in Time Magazine, it says the Texas model—of course it’s not just cheap living that draws people to Texas. It’s also jobs. In the past 12 months, Texas has added 274,700 new jobs. That’s 12% of all jobs added nationwide, and 51,000 more jobs than California added. That’s pretty incredible. Now, I’ll just look down the article, and the person being quoted here says, “my uninformed friends usually say, but Texas creates low-paying jobs! To that I respond, you are right. We create more low-paying jobs in Texas than anybody else,” Fischer says, “but we also create far more high-paying jobs. In fact, from 2002 to 2011, with 8% of the US population, Texas created nearly one third of the country’s highest paying jobs.” That, my friends, is a pretty amazing feat. Now, that is also true of other—what’s true of the state of Texas is mainly true in certain cities of Texas, and you know how much I like Houston. But this is also true to a lesser degree of cities like Atlanta, cities like Memphis—of these other low-cost, business-friendly places around the US. It’s even true of Indianapolis. Tried and true for us. So, there are lots of places that follow this same model and this same trend, even if it’s to a slightly lesser degree. So, a lot to think about and a lot to check out there. Now, our guest today is Doug Conant, who has got some very interesting things to talk about in his book called TouchPoints. It’s personal development. We’re going to talk about TouchPoints, how to connect and engage with people for your business or personal life. We’re going to talk about leadership, and some interesting stuff there. So I’ll keep this intro very short, and I just want to say one more time, make sure to check out our—oh, by the way. Make sure to check out our sales on our remaining closeouts of physical product for Creating Wealth Home Study Course, and Meet the Masters Home Study Course physical product for about half price of the digital product. But we do have an overall—not Black Friday sale, but a cyber Monday sale, which is 40% off on all of our digital products at www.jasonhartman.com, and this starts when you hear this Podcast by using the promo code “cyber,” but it ends in just a week. So we’re starting cyber Monday just a little sooner, but ending it sooner as well than most retailers. And that is 40% off. So if you’ve wanted any of our digital products, whether it be Creating Wealth Home Study Course, Meet the Masters Home Study is a digital or a physical product, you can get some big giant discounts on that. So go to www.jasonhartman.com, click on products, and take advantage of these big savings—40%. That’s I think about the biggest it’s been. Don’t forget, the promo code for that at checkout is “cyber,” and you can get some big giant discounts there. So happy Thanksgiving to all, and let’s go to our guest, Doug Conant, as we talk about TouchPoints.

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JASON HARTMAN: It’s my pleasure to welcome Doug Conant to the show. He is the author of TouchPoints, and he’s got some amazing insights, that may seem rather obvious to most people, however, there are always new ways we can apply them and be more effective in life and leadership, and I think you’ll hear a real transformative message here today. Doug, welcome. How are you?

DOUG CONANT: I’m great. Thank you for having me!

JASON HARTMAN: Well, the pleasure is all mine. So give us a little bit of information about your background, and then let’s dive into TouchPoints!

DOUG CONANT: Well, my background is really—I’ve come up in the corporate world. Less than two years ago I retired after over 10 years as Chief Executive Officer of the Campbell’s Soup Company. Prior to that I spent a career in consumer products with General Mills, Kraft, Nabisco, and wrapped up my career with Campbell’s Soup Company in Camden, New Jersey, right outside of Philadelphia. Along the way I’ve been heavily involved in all kinds of corporate activity, but a lot of nonprofit activity. So, my focus today—and my focus going forward, quite frankly—is, how best to improve the quality of leadership in the 21st century. Sharing my experiences, and trying to encourage people to lean into the notion of being more effective as leaders in everyday life.

JASON HARTMAN: And your tenure at Campbell’s Soup as CEO started in 2001, is that correct?

DOUG CONANT: Yes. January 8th, 2001. Seems like yesterday!

JASON HARTMAN: [LAUGHTER] But it’s actually quite a few years ago. Campbell’s is such an iconic brand, for well over 100 years of history. Were there any big challenges when you came aboard? I haven’t followed the history of that company too much, but what were some of the things? And you probably incorporated them into the TouchPoints book and philosophy, I assume.

DOUG CONANT: Yeah, a lot of the book TouchPoints was born out of my experience with Campbell’s Soup Company. Campbell’s Soup Company is an iconic company. It’s about $10 billion in sales, and 20,000 employees. Products sold in 120 countries. And we were very committed to having an enduring business proposition for a company. It was over 140 years old, and had 11 CEOs over those 140 years. I was the 11th. And it was a troubled company. We lost half our market value in one year, which is unheard of for a large food company. And we had a very toxic work environment, our business was falling apart for a variety of reasons. Employees were very disaffected, and I was challenged to come in and make sure we had the right strategy and rebuild the organization top to bottom, which is what we did. As we did that, TouchPoints became an obvious critical part of what I had to do. I had to reconnect people to this notion that as a community we could do something special. We could focus on winning in the marketplace, but also creating a winning workplace where they could thrive and prosper. And as a result, over a decade, we went—we dramatically improved our marketplace performance, but more importantly, we created a highly engaged culture where every employee was valued and challenged to do their best work, and they felt as if the company had their back. Not a bad feeling when you’re working in a tough environment, is to feel like you’re not going it alone.

JASON HARTMAN: And just to give you a little bit of background on Campbell’s, how many employees, and I’m curious, was that workforce unionized? Probably not unionized, I assume?

DOUG CONANT: Well, we have 20,000 employees globally. There were pockets of union activity, but by and large, no. We weren’t heavily unionized. And we were focused on meeting the needs of our employees to such an extent that they never felt the need to unionize. And by and large we did that. But we did have some union activity, and we navigated through that typically pretty effectively in my decade.

JASON HARTMAN: And you say that TouchPoints is really—by the way, the subtitle of the book is: Creating Powerful Leadership Connections in the Smallest of Moments. And you say that it is a blinding glimpse of the obvious. But maybe not really that obvious, is it?

DOUG CONANT: Well, no. Today, most employees—most people in general—feel as if they’re getting a sip of water from the fire hydrant of life. They are having 200 to 400 interactions per day, either via email, Twitter, text messaging, phone calls, people stopping by their office, and the list goes on and on and on. And as a result, they struggle with—how do I navigate this crazy life? And that’s a good question. So if I go around the country, this issue seems to be the biggest issue of the day in most corporate cultures, and quite honestly in the nonprofit and government sector too. It’s that these people are so overwhelmed with all of these interactions. So what we’ve tried to do with TouchPoints is to say, don’t think of the 400 interactions. Think of the next interaction you have. And how can you be more effective—in the moment, so effective—that you’re able to be more efficient with it as well, and able to help the other person? So, we created this notion of TouchPoints. And we said, there’s three things you need to do. You need to listen intently to what’s coming at you in the moment. You need to make sure you can understand the context of that decision. And then you need to help the person. So we challenged people to bring a how-can-I-help mentality to work, listen carefully, frame the issue carefully, and advance it. Listen, frame, advance. Listen, frame, advance. And then when the interaction’s over you say how did it go, and what we have found is, when people just focus on the moment and try to be helpful in an earnest way, they tend to get traction with their life again, and they get traction with their coworkers. We have found that if you can just advance 3 to 5 interactions in a significantly more healthy way today than you did yesterday, out of the 200-400 you have, 3 to 5 more interactions managed in a more healthy way, you can change your contribution profile in your place of work or at home. And that’s what we encourage people to do: to take this simple approach and apply it every day in a disciplined way. And they can start to lead a much more fulfilling life.

JASON HARTMAN: One of the phrases you just mentioned—even just having that phrase occur to one is probably a huge step forward. And the phrase is, “contribution profile.” Very interesting.

DOUG CONANT: It’s all about, how can I help. If you were to go to my website at www.conantleadership.com, I’ve profiled—I just picked 10 TouchPoints in my life, where somebody says the right thing, in the right way, at just the right time, and I carry it with me today. In fact, of all the education I’ve had in college, graduate school, and continuing education courses, they’ve been wonderful and I’m a better person for it, but quite frankly, those 10 TouchPoints, which when I add it all up and I say all the words together it’s about 40 seconds, or about 6 words a TouchPoint—those small TouchPoints can help—they actually guide my life. One of those TouchPoints was only four words: how can I help? And it occurred to me when I was fired from a job, and the outplacement guy—every time he’d answer the phone he’d say, hello, this is Neil McKenna; how can I help? And since that day, and it was 27 years ago, I have gone into every interaction saying (in my mind), “Hello, I’m Doug Conant. How can I help?” How can I contribute? And the more I focus on raising my contribution profile, the more I flourish in my work experience. And so, I just encourage other people to try and do the same thing.

JASON HARTMAN: Well, that’s a great question to ask. It’s a great context to just come from that point of view, the how-can-I-help point of view. Can you give us any examples of maybe an interaction where someone might do this and increase their contribution profile? And when you mentioned that, when you were talking about that, it made me think of a few key words in relationships that I have, and how literally even a text message to someone saying the right thing at the ostensibly right time, makes a whole difference in the whole relationship or the friendship, for years to come. It’s incredible!

DOUG CONANT: Yeah, it’s an amazing thing. The best way for people to grasp the concept is that when I’m speaking with an audience, we get to the point very early in the presentation where I ask them to close their eyes and think about someone that’s had a profound influence on them in their life. A teacher, a coach, occasionally a boss, though typically it isn’t. A parent, a grandparent, an aunt or uncle, or a good friend. And I ask them to close their eyes and imagine that person is sitting there with them now. And then I ask them to think about a moment where that person was totally there for them. They were listening carefully to what was going on, and they were totally there for them, and they found a way to say just the right thing, in just the right way, at just the right time. And then I encouraged the people in the audience to turn to the person next to them and to share that experience with them. And then I encouraged the other person to share back. Takes about two minutes. Everyone has a story about—for example my story about how can I help. And I’m sure you have your story. Everybody has a story. And then I challenge these people, I say, now you—that is the essence of TouchPoints. And my challenge to you is to try to be that person for the people with whom you live and work. And as people reflect on that, they get it. And they get it in the marrow of their bones, because they’ve lived it. They’ve had people that have had that kind of profound impact on them, in small moments. It’s not big long lectures. None of us—most of us don’t have those kinds of experiences that create traction in our lives. It’s those people that were there for us, and said just the right thing at just the right time in just the right way. And I just asked people to be more like that with the people with whom they live and work. And you don’t need to go any further than that. They get it. And then the challenge is to bring the discipline to it. To try to behave that way today a little more than you did yesterday. You don’t have to get all the way to (unintelligible), but you do have to do a little better today than you did yesterday.

JASON HARTMAN: Just that constant progress, that movement in the right direction can make such a difference. Do you profile in the book any sample interactions? It would be good to sort of compare the wrong way to do it and the right way to do it, type of thing. If you can—I’m probably putting you on the spot, so I apologize. So if you can think of an example, I think it would be helpful for the listeners.

DOUG CONANT: Of the 10 that I have that are sampled in one of my videos on my website at www.conantleadership.com, one of them was a horrible example! It was a negative experience. All TouchPoints are not positive experiences. In one case, I went into work one day—I’d been working for this company for nearly 10 years—and the acting vice president of marketing had me come to his office when I came to work that day, and he said, your job has been eliminated, you need to be out of here by noon. And he couldn’t look me in the eye. And nearly 10 years of my career was over in a snap, and I had to go home to my wife, my two small children, my one very large mortgage, seeming every bit the victim. And in that moment, I was devastated and I was bitter. And that was a negative TouchPoint. That same day, I was sent to an outplacement counselor who I had first said, I’m not gonna go see him, I was so angry, but then I called him later in the day because I realized I was really having trouble processing all of this, and it was my friend Neil McKenna—a guy who went on to become my friend—who said Neil McKenna; how can I help? Come right over. I want to hear all about it. Let’s get to work on this right away. And I had one of the best experiences of my life, on the same day as I had one of the worst experiences of my career. Those were two TouchPoints. The first TouchPoint has influenced how I’ve dealt with people in difficult situations for the balance of my lifetime, for I have said, I will never treat anyone as poorly as I feel I was treated in that moment. And it has guided me in a direction of being more thoughtful, and still being tough-hearted on issues, but being tender-hearted with people. And then the second interaction with Neil McKenna, as I shared earlier in this conversation, has influenced how I try and bring the how-can-I-help attitude to everything I do. So, those are two small interactions that I had with others; one was negative, one was positive, and they have had a guiding influence in my life.

JASON HARTMAN: Very good.

DOUG CONANT: And to build on that, as a CEO I was always looking for, how can I connect with people in a positive way? And reinforce things that they’re doing right? Because in corporate cultures, you’re pretty much trained to find everything wrong. I can find a busted number in a spreadsheet like no one else. But you know, we need to also celebrate what’s going right. So every day when I was CEO of Campbell’s—virtually every day—I would write 10-20 handwritten thank-you notes, no more than 50 words, typically—to employees all around the world who had done something right. Who had delivered a project on time and on budget, or who had done some extraordinary thing when we had the Japanese tsunami, or the tsunami in the Philippines, or whatever it was. So I would send out 6 days a week 10-20 notes over 10 years. When I retired we added all the notes up, and it turned out I’d sent over 30,000 notes to employees, and we only have 20,000 employees!

JASON HARTMAN: So you touched them more than once.

DOUG CONANT: I had touched them in a personal way. It was handwritten; I didn’t want them thinking some CEO was having somebody email them for him. And I just, as a postscript to that—people felt like I was connecting with them. I was paying attention. I was reinforcing the behaviors that we were looking to get in the company, in terms of performance. They were not gratuitous, but they were saying look, we’re paying attention, we value what you’re doing; the more I leaned into that, the more I saw employees lean into their work, and feel as if they were valued. So that was a simple way I created positive TouchPoints to counterbalance all the other stuff we had to do, which was make a lot of tough calls.

JASON HARTMAN: That’s a great TouchPoint. That isn’t very scalable, but it is very cumulative. So, very powerful, obviously, handwritten notes, etc. But what are some of the—at times, Doug, you’ve definitely got to use TouchPoints in a mass media format. I mean, CEOs have to do that, media personalities have to do it, politicians have to do it. Do you have any advice for mass media TouchPoints? Even if it’s someone holding a sales meeting for 10 employees. It doesn’t have to be a giant corporate leader, or political or celebrity figure. Just a TouchPoint when it’s not one on one?

DOUG CONANT: Well, I have some guiding thoughts on that. I guess the most—first of all, make it personal. If you want people to take their work personally, and really lean into the work, they need to believe that they’re connecting with you in a more personal way. So in whatever communication you choose to have, whatever format it is—in fact, the more you have to lean into social media formats, the more you have to be ever more thoughtful about how you can make it personal. The second thing is that people can smell a rat a mile a way. Don’t play games. You have to show up in an authentic way as well as a personal way. And if you want to have credibility over time, people have to believe that what you see is what you get, and that you’re gonna do what you say you’re gonna do. So you have to show up with great authenticity. If you make it personal and you show up with authenticity, those are kind of the—those are the do’s to get into the game. That’s the ante. Then you have to show up with confidence. If you really want to have influence with people over time, they have to believe that you know what you’re doing. My wife was in theater years ago, and she—if you’re in theater, you work nights and weekends when other people aren’t working. So I would come home, and I’d have to help out with our children. And I had to cook dinner. Now, they thought I was a person of good character, and I was a pretty good father, but they did know that I couldn’t cook worth a hoot. So, they couldn’t count on me for dinner. I didn’t have a lot of credibility there. So it was a reminder to me that if you really want to have influence with people, and you want to inspire confidence, you have to have two things. You have to have character, you have to show up in a personal and authentic way, but you also have to know what you’re doing. And if you don’t you’re gonna have to acknowledge that. So as a leader, those are the things you need to bring to the party if you want to start to have impact with people. In the moment, through TouchPoints, you have to show up in a truly authentic way, and you have to know what you’re doing.

JASON HARTMAN: Yeah, character trust and competence trust, both of those so important. Are there any examples that you can think of in the mass media world from theaters and whatever position—media life, political life, corporate life—that have, in a speech for example, successfully used TouchPoints in a positive way, and really connected and inspired their audience?

DOUG CONANT: Well, in my lifetime, we had one particular president who was good at connecting with people. There was a group of people that called him the Great Communicator. Ronald Reagan could connect with people in a deeply personal way. He had enormous credibility with the everyday man and woman. He brought conversations onto a level that was approachable by those people. He showed up in an authentic way. And by and large, he led a life where he did what he said he was going to do. And those are simple rules to live by, but that’s the cost of doing business today. We have a very jaundiced, jaded perspective of leaders today. And I think the challenge for leaders today is to show up in a truly authentic way, and Ronald Reagan would be the guy I would go to who touched people in a way that I haven’t seen many other political leaders quite frankly before or since, connect with. To me, he was the gold standard when it came to mass media.

JASON HARTMAN: And I couldn’t agree more; when I listen to his speeches I sometimes get goose bumps. I mean, he’s such an effective communicator. And I’d say—I mean, it was before my time, but Jack Kennedy was also quite inspiring like that. So you’ve got both sides of the aisle there.

DOUG CONANT: True. Actually, I thought Bobby Kennedy, to me, was showing up more authentically. Jack Kennedy was incredibly inspiring, and we were gonna go to the moon, and we were going to do extraordinary things. Bobby Kennedy was touching people in a much more earnest and personal way; in my opinion, he was an amazing communicator. So, it’s not about political parties; it’s about authenticity, and doing it in a way that connects with the hearts and minds of people. In our book on TouchPoints we say you’ve gotta do three things. You’ve gotta connect to the head, and the heart, and you’ve gotta use your hands in terms of developing the practices to be more effective over time. So it’s head, heart, hands. And if you can do that on all three dimensions, you can connect with people in a meaningful way.

JASON HARTMAN: Sure. Just one more thing on the political spectrum. So many people say that Clinton was very effective like that, and I never saw it in Clinton, I just didn’t get the greatness of Clinton’s charisma that some people comment on, and I’d love your feedback on that. I just never saw it in him, like everybody else.

DOUG CONANT: I don’t pass judgment on people. He was clearly highly effective with a lot of people who found his earnest approach to conversation—it resonated with them. He clearly did connect with people. He was elected twice, and he had an approval rating that was extraordinary. So, it would be hard to argue….

JASON HARTMAN: Yeah. All I know—I have friends who have met him who are critical of him and don’t like him politically, but say, you meet that guy in person, and he’s just a likeable guy. So obviously something was working there, I guess I kind of missed that one. But, you know, when you dissect these great communicators, going back to Reagan, any thoughts on how Reagan did it? I mean, I think he appeared to be a common, very relatable person. He used metaphor and visuals. Humor, certainly humor, though humor seems to be a thing that is not available to everyone—some people have it and some don’t, when it comes to humor, as far as I can see. But humor is a very good technique to open doors and create TouchPoints, isn’t it?

DOUG CONANT: Well, I would connect it back to our TouchPoint model, and we’ll use Reagan as the example. You felt that if Reagan would come into every moment with this I-want-to-be-helpful mindset—people felt heard by Reagan. He would listen intently, and then he would frame issues in a way to make the people say, okay, you get it, and then he tried to make things a little better today than he did yesterday. Ronald Reagan I would argue had a wonderful continuous improvement mindset. With a very aspirational model for how the world could be. He was just trying to be helpful every day, and my observation was that that was somewhat unmistakable, and people kind of looked at him in general saying, what you see is what you get. He’s a regular guy who’s listening to us, who’s showing us he understands the issues we feel are important, and he’s trying to make things a little better today. And he’s with us. And I’ve found that applying the same listen frame advance mindset, and bringing a how-can-I-help mentality to the work, Ronald Reagan was incredibly effective. I also saw that quite frankly with FDR, and we can go beyond that, you can also find that with Gandhi and Mother Theresa and a variety of other leaders around the world. They all bring a how-can-I-help mindset to the work that people grasp; they are all wonderful listeners, they make sure they understand the issues, and they just try and advance things in a way that works for them, authentically. So, I think it’s a simple model. It’s not a new model, but it’s this notion of, how can I help? Listen frame advance, and then ask yourself how did it go, and try and do a little better today than you did yesterday. And in today’s chaotic times, I think it’s easier to go back to things that are elegantly simple, and get to the far side of complexity, and get to things that are approachable, that you can actually bring to life in your everyday life. And that’s the power of TouchPoints.

JASON HARTMAN: Very important, most definitely very important. And if you look at that in the high tech world, certainly Apple has brought simplicity, and I think people are craving that kind of simplicity, and that high-touch thinking, no question about it. Well, the website is www.conantleadership.com, of course Doug, the book is available in all of the usual places I’m sure, right?

DOUG CONANT: Yes, absolutely. Amazon, anywhere you can get them. You can’t miss it. And we also provide information on the website.

JASON HARTMAN: And New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller—good work. I think it’s high time the marketplace has a book like TouchPoints. And anything else you’d like to say in closing?

DOUG CONANT: I guess the observation is that we can all do better, and if we want to have a better world, we all have to lean into that notion, and we all have to try and do a little better today than we did yesterday in terms of working shoulder to shoulder with the people in our work community in our lives to make things a little better. If we bring that continuous improvement mindset to the work, with this notion of we can do better, in my opinion we will.

JASON HARTMAN: Fantastic. Well Doug Conant, thank you so much for joining us today.

DOUG CONANT: Alright, best of luck to you Jason. Thank you very much.

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ANNOUNCER: Are you interested in a property outside of our network? Do you need a second opinion? No problem! Let Jason’s experts evaluate the deal. For more information, go to www.jasonhartman.com now.

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ANNOUNCER: This show is produced by the Hartman Media Company. All rights reserved. For distribution or publication rights and media interviews, please visit www.HartmanMedia.com, or email [email protected]. Nothing on this show should be considered specific personal or professional advice. Please consult an appropriate tax, legal, real estate, or business professional for any individualized advice. Opinions of guests are their own, and the host is acting on behalf of Empowered Investor, LLC. exclusively. (Image: Flickr | cliff1066)

Transcribed by David

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