The Uncommon Leader Podcast
Are you ready to break free from mediocrity and lead an extraordinary life? Join us on The Uncommon Leadership Podcast as we explore the power of intentionality in personal and professional growth. Our podcast features insightful interviews with inspiring leaders from all walks of life, sharing their stories of overcoming challenges and achieving greatness.
Discover practical strategies to:
- Think positively and cultivate a growth mindset
- Live a healthy and balanced lifestyle
- Build your faith and find inner strength
- Read more and expand your knowledge
- Stay strong in the face of adversity
- Work hard with purpose and passion
- Network effectively to build meaningful relationships
- Worry less and focus on what matters
- Love always and make a positive impact
In each episode, we'll dive into relevant leadership topics, share inspiring stories, and provide actionable steps you can take to elevate your life. Whether you're a seasoned leader or just starting your journey, The Uncommon Leadership Podcast offers valuable insights and practical guidance to help you achieve your goals and live your best life.
The Uncommon Leader Podcast
Leadership Revolution: From Purpose-Driven Business to AI Ethics with Charles Spinosa
Discover how Charles Spinosa, a visionary in leadership and business growth, navigated a challenging start in rural New Jersey to earn recognition as a thought leader. Marked by an early mislabeling in school, Charles shares his compelling personal story of triumph over adversity, fueled by a passion for literature and a knack for math and science. His journey is a testament to the power of perseverance and intellectual curiosity, inspiring leaders to challenge the status quo and embrace a more humanistic approach to business.
Join our conversation as we unpack the shift from profit-centric to purpose-driven business strategies. Witness how aligning with community values can double profitability and foster ethical distinction that goes beyond the conventional business playbook. With insights from both business veterans and scholars, we explore how embracing the humanities can enliven market dynamics, urging leaders to integrate core values into their strategies and redefine economic success.
Prepare to engage with the complex interplay of moral risk and artificial intelligence, a frontier where ethical decision-making becomes paramount. Charles illuminates the responsibilities of those crafting AI algorithms, especially as these technologies permeate critical areas like the military. Through the lens of his book, "Leadership as Masterpiece Creation," Charles invites leaders to become moral artists, using courage and creativity to inspire innovation and growth. Connect with Charles on LinkedIn for deeper insights and explore his work to transform your leadership journey.
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I see business masterpieces are those that are ethically distinctive, that are morally distinctive, have a sense of what's right. That's really tied in very deeply to the business. And if you do have a sense of what's right and it's different from your industry, as it will be if you're distinctive, then you're going to do some things that look shocking to your industry look shocking to your industry.
Speaker 2:Hey, uncommon Leaders, welcome back. This is the Uncommon Leader Podcast and I'm your host, john Gallagher. In today's episode, I'm excited to have Charles Spinoza join us to discuss themes from his book Leadership as a Masterpiece Creation. Charles brings a wealth of experience from his challenging childhood in rural New Jersey, where he defied the odds to excel in academia, to his extensive career as a consultant, improving operational efficiency and profitability through humanistic values. We'll explore his journey from Shakespeare scholar to management consultant, diving into his innovative approach to leadership and business growth through moral risk-taking growth through moral risk-taking. This episode is packed with insights on how leaders can listen better, engage with diverse perspectives and build organizations that not only thrive but also enrich lives. So let's get started. Charles Spinoza, welcome to the Uncommon Leader Podcast. I'm real excited about our conversation today. How are you doing today?
Speaker 1:I'm doing very well, John. Thank you for having me here. I look forward to talking about what will turn out to be the themes of my book, and I hope your audience loves it as well.
Speaker 2:I think the listeners are going to get a lot out of it. I know before we hit the record button we had some good conversation going already and it's one of those things like I need the B-roll to add it in. So we'll try to reproduce some of that conversation as we go forward. But I'll start you off the same way. I start all the guests on the Uncommon Leader podcast and I said tell me a story from your childhood that still impacts who you are today, as a leader or as a person.
Speaker 1:I'm delighted to do that and, by the way, I want to say I think that's the best way to get to know leaders right from the get-go. I call that in my practice, I call that what's your fundamental story, foundational story, and it's the story you have to change as you evolve as a leader. But you need to know what it is. So here's mine. It shows who I am, blemishes and virtues alike. I grew up in New Jersey in a family that wasn't really fully functional. My parents did not get along at all and in my childhood we lived in a rural part of New Jersey and I'd wander around in the woods and I was sort of a wandering, sort of like a cloud, wandering all over the person. I started school and was very much the same way wandered around, did my best, liked school by and large, made some friends, but there was nothing very, very deep and binding. Then in fifth grade this is the Sputnik era we all took IQ tests and my parents were educators. They totally believed in IQ tests at the time and I did terribly on it. I came out in a way that was then called mentally retarded and moved away from my friends and the classes that I was in and put in the class of other people who had tested the same way the mentally retarded class and I was horrified. I was not like the other people in that class. I could see that I had never thought of myself as having intellectual pretensions this is fifth grade, after all but I determined that I was. I had to get out of it and I asked my parents what I could do, and my father said well, you know, maybe you can become a carpenter one day. You really work hard. I said no, that's not what I want. My mother said well, it's not likely. You can do very much, but try reading. And so that was it. That was exactly what I did.
Speaker 1:I demanded my parents take me to the local bookstore, which was some drive away. There was no Amazon, no easy way of getting books, and in those days this is the early 60s Freud showed up as the leading intellectual, and so I read everything by Freud and by some of his followers, eric Krohn, that I could. And I brought this into my conversations with my teachers and it did not go over that well, but they saw that I was unusual. I was unusual. I would tell teachers that they were acting in the way they were because of some disturbance they had and seeing their primal scene with their parents when they were young and was touched on insanity. So my first attempt to get out didn't work. But I came to see that in those days being able to do really well in math and science was the ticket. People thought of those as objective, they thought of those as really, and so I threw myself into doing math and science.
Speaker 1:I became a fiercely well, fiercely intellectual because nobody expected it or wanted it in the classes I was in and by eighth grade I was released into the advanced courses and that struggle has defined me. I do have, you know, my youth. I was fiercely intellectual. I have modified that over the years. I'm something of an explainer now, I hope, a generous explainer, although most people say no, charles, you're still a challenging explainer. Now, I hope, a generous explainer. Although most people say, no, charles, you're still a challenging explainer, you haven't left it that far. They might be right, I can't tell. But that's me. I don't think I have the chip on my shoulder that I had before. If not, if I do, it's much, much lighter and and I'm trying to find out what's true and what's interesting.
Speaker 2:I always love the stories of childhood and how they how they connect and certainly, as I look at a little bit of your past, I can I can understand, uh, how that connects. You know, uh, many of the stories that I talk with folks are folks that overcame stories, just like whether it was deaths in their family or stuttering as a child and how someone became very successful and sometime it takes that to overcome. In fact, auntie Ann Byler was another guest and the name of her book was Overcome and Lead. Her tragedy occurred later in life in terms of some of those things, but they are the things that frame us and, as we chatted about beforehand, sometimes we're there to help the person that we used to be, to get them through situations like that.
Speaker 2:So you went from that challenge class in fifth grade to the advanced classes after eighth grade. You ultimately ended up being a professor and we're going to talk about that as well. But really what we're here today is to talk about, ultimately, how you took some of that reading, if you will, and talk about that and turned it into your consulting practice as well to help business. Name your book. What Business Leaders Can Learn from the Humanities About Moral Risk Taking, that's the subtopic.
Speaker 1:But Leadership as Masterpiece Creation.
Speaker 2:And that is something that, first of all, I found as a fascinating title, and it does connect in terms of when you're listening through it but a masterpiece creation. So let's start right there before we can get into the why and who you wrote it for. How do you define what that is as a masterpiece creation in terms of the?
Speaker 1:title. That's my basic disposition. For years I was a consultant. For 27 years I was a consultant. What you do as a consultant is you try to help people become more operationally efficient, operationally profitable, productive, gain new clients, new revenue, and I always did it by trying to help them give their employees better lives or give their customers better lives. So that was my past in the humanities, but I was focused on operations, as are other consultants, and good businesses look like high performing businesses that have high stock premiums and that's it. But I realized that that was not exactly what the leaders wanted.
Speaker 1:One of my best cases ever that was written up in the California Management Review, blue Ocean Strategy, prahalad's book on the pyramid and so forth was Cemex. We invented a way of selling cement to poorer Mexicans and we did it by bridging the values between middle class Mexicans who ran CEMEX and poorer Mexicans. Poorer Mexicans at the time loved their neighborhoods, loved warmth, didn't really see financial responsibility as important. Planning was seen as evil. Important Planning was seen as evil. These are all things that the middle class Mexicans like. How did they save money? They didn't save money. What they do is they form little clubs. They pull their money all together and one person would get the money from the club and they change who got it each week. We took that and we made that into a cement tonda. That's what they called those clubs.
Speaker 1:The company Cemex doubled its profitability from this segment. Some places it tripled its profitability, the segment itself. They built their homes cheaper and faster, significantly faster. So it was win-win totally, and basic practice stayed in the company for about 17 years.
Speaker 1:But the Cemex managers didn't like it. Why didn't they like it? They wanted their customers to become like middle-class Mexicans. They didn't want to be serving this community. They had a sense of what the right way to be was. Now you would think that I should have gotten that right away, given my background in the humanities, but no, I was caught up in consulting, trying to get operational efficiency. It was a great case more customers, more profits, better life for customers, and it took me a very long time to realize that what people who lead businesses want is to create a world, create an organization that does what it considers the right thing for its employees, the right thing for its customers, the right thing for its suppliers, the right thing for its shareholders. Some go to other stakeholder groups beyond that, but those are the core that every day they're dealing with, and so every day they're trying to do the right thing for and I love the thought of the example right off the bat in terms of organizations who have used this approach and been successful with it.
Speaker 2:right, successful in the terms of business. Successful, though, in what I'm hearing saying is also in the impact that their business is having or that they want to have. One of the things I've heard before it's kind of purpose before profits, or purpose precedes profits, or a lot of different ways to do that, but those organizations that can see the need that they fill and also be profitable at the same time can create something that's pretty powerful.
Speaker 1:Now I just want to say that's what I'm about. I have a narrower sense of purpose than a lot of the people who talk about purpose have. For me, the purpose is something that comes from the leadership team's heart. Why is it that we're treating customers this way? And so it's not something that just anybody on the street would see. That's a good purpose. The business should attach itself to that, or should attach itself to that. I'm sorry to interrupt.
Speaker 2:No, no, no, that's okay. That's more about hearing your story than hearing from me, anyway in terms as we go forward. So anytime you think you have a different perspective on, I'd love to hear as you go forward, as you wrote the book and I know it's not your first book but as you wrote this book who were you writing it to and why was now the right time to write this book?
Speaker 1:Okay, I was writing it to three different audiences. The first audience was leaders. It's leaders of organizations larger than small, organizations right up through Fortune 500 companies, but not market shapers, not the Jeff Bezos of the world, not the you know, the Anita Roddick's people like that. It's people who feel constrained by the business school education, by all the consultants, to just focus on operational success. As I say, most of them, all the ones I've encountered I've encountered a few CFOs who just care about operational success, but almost everybody I've encountered wants to create a business that they can be proud of, ethically, that is, that does the right things, that stretches employees, the right amount, that gives enough attention, the right amount of attention stretches employees, the right amount, that gives the right amount of attention to customers and so forth, and not more. And they work on that and they think about that every night. That's what managers do. Should I stretch that person more? Should we spend more time with these customers? How can we get more efficient? How can we get more goods to this other set of customers that don't know about us? These are all the kinds of questions that managers live with, and they're all in the moral dimension. They're not. What can I do pragmatically to make a little bit more money? It's what is the right thing. That's how people think about it.
Speaker 1:And so that's the first group people who are now thinking that all they should do is produce operational success, but are hankering to do more. That's the first group. The second group is business school professors. Those are the people who are most likely to buy my book, and so I wanted to satisfy them.
Speaker 1:And the third group is virtually anybody professors or students in the humanities and one of the ambitions of the book is to show that someone steeped in the humanities like me has a role to play in making our economy and marketplace more vibrant, and to end years of thinking in the humanities that business is just about needs and fulfilling needs, and the area where people are free to design their lives are the arts, are politics, law and so forth. For me and this is sort of a billboard moment the moral artists of today are today's business leaders, right, and so I want to get that. So if you want to help the moral artists of today, which is what people in the humanities want to do get yourself into business. See how what you're doing helps you. So those are the three segments. I'm sorry for such a long window.
Speaker 2:No, that's.
Speaker 1:OK, I'll summarize Business leaders who are not making their businesses into masterpieces yet Teachers, mba teachers and other business school teachers and people in the humanities all over who want to really make a difference.
Speaker 2:The timing of the book as well. I mean, here in the States we're in election year and I think it comes up a lot in terms of even how we drive the overall performance of a country inside of business, but the economies of scale and all those things that go on. So I think, bringing that into play and again the term in the subtitle, as I so uneloquently listed, was, you know, moral risk-taking. So what is moral risk-taking from your perspective?
Speaker 1:Okay, I'll give you the example of Anita Roddick, since it's the easiest example, but just in general, I see business masterpieces are those that are ethically distinctive, that are morally distinctive, have a sense of what's right. That's really tied in very deeply to the business. And if you do have a sense of what's right and it's different from your industry, as it will be, if you're distinctive, then you're going to do some things that look shocking to your industry to make this new moral order come to life, and so moral risk are those shocking things. So let me give you the example Anita Roddick. She started out with her husband running two family businesses, a hotel and a restaurant but she was angry at what she called the beauty business. And she was angry at the beauty business initially because she saw them deceiving women. They were making promises that women could buy their products and look younger, and basically the moral order of the business that she saw was that everybody wanted to look better. Youth was the only way of looking better, and the way to get people to try to look young was to make them feel anxious. So how do you do that? You have gorgeous models who are leading the good life and the implication is, you have to look like this to lead a good life. And it drove Anita Roddick crazy because not because they were lying just straight away, but because all the women knew that they were lying and they still went there. And so she wanted to create a business that made buying products for your skin cosmetics and other products for your skin enjoyable and fun, and they could do it compassionately and you could appreciate your own knowledge about who you were as a woman. And that was she was bringing in all sorts of traditional understandings of how to take care of yourself into the business, but that was essentially what she wanted to do Now.
Speaker 1:First moral risk she talked to her husband and it turns out her daughters, but primarily her husband into selling the two businesses that they already owned, getting a bank loan. There's a whole story about that, about how she didn't get it first. Her husband managed to get it and starting a business in an industry where they knew nothing, nothing at all, that's a risk to your family. Obviously, you're going to look irresponsible if you can't pull it off, and so that was her first moral risk. And a moral risk is where the action you take is going to look shocking to people around you irresponsible and if you don't pull it off, people will evaluate you poorly. You're a moral fool.
Speaker 1:In this case, the business. She started her business in Brighton, which is on the South Sea coast of England, and it turned out to be successful. However, nobody in the beauty industry took it seriously. For them it looked like it was sort of hippie women that were going to go and try out these products, but they didn't mind losing that segment of the market. It was not a real profitable segment of the market anyway and this deeply disturbed her and she said the only way I'm going to be able to change this industry is if I show that I can grow. And she took that to her husband and family.
Speaker 1:Her husband was her CFO at the time and you can just hear the conversation. I want to get more money from a bank. I want to grow the business. Well, why do you want to grow the business? Because we're not facing any competition from the big players. They're not trying to hammer us. Now you're telling me that's a bad thing. And she was telling him it was a bad thing and how important was growth to her. This is another shocking thing. He went away on a business trip. She sold half the shares in the company to a neighbor. 50% of the shares of the company to a neighbor to get the money to start the next business. Shares of the company to a neighbor to get the money to start the next business.
Speaker 1:Now, I'm not saying that was something that became a good thing in general, but it showed how important growth was to her, that she was willing to take that moral risk, which she took.
Speaker 1:Her husband came back from the trip, saw that the second store was doing okay and went along with her and, as she said, was doing okay and went along with her and, as she said, became her rock from that point on.
Speaker 1:So as a second, more so, and growth became. We always think of the body shop, as is as this place. It's very nice to work in, it's taking care of women's bodies, but she was a businesswoman who cared massively about growth. In fact, by the time she sold it it had more international stores than any other retail business in the UK and you couldn't get a job in the body shop if you didn't care about growth. Her third moral risk was she really wanted to cement that this is a joyful experience that people are exploring and she basically let people sample all they wanted in the shop and she was teaching people. It could have been that teaching them to be shop become shoplifters. It turned out they caught the missionary spirit of the body shop and it grew and grew and grew and for me it's not such a problem that the body shop is in trouble now, years after she left it, because there are lots of other places like Blue, mercury and.
Speaker 1:Sephora and others who have taken over that mantle and keep it alive in the industry. So that's a case and it's typical. Normally it takes three moral risks to cement the new change in the moral order.
Speaker 2:I think about that and as I listened through, just as you went through, there was a current situation that exists back into the world that we live in today and that's Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter or X, whatever. That is Definitely moral risk inside of that, how he would proclaim that he's attempting to say free speech as it exists and some of those things that are there Definitely a story in that space.
Speaker 1:Right, it's mostly private money, but I would love that story. I've been reading Isaacson's biography of Elon Musk. It seems to me he takes one moral risk after another, after another, but they're not well documented. Nobody talks about it For me, what is the moral order he's changing Now with this space, space company? It's clearly he wants to bring back the pioneer spirit, where we are going to mars and setting up a colony there and and he apparently he talks about that himself, but we don't know. We we don't have all the risks tied in to doing that, but he certainly changed. And free speech is another place, with Twitter, which is now X, where he's working really hard to change what we consider acceptable speech in the media.
Speaker 2:Hey listeners, I want to take a quick moment to share something special with you. Many of the topics and discussions we have on this podcast are areas where I provide coaching and consulting services for individuals and organizations. If you've been inspired by our conversation and are seeking a catalyst for change in your own life or within your team, I invite you to visit coachjohngallaghercom forward slash free call to sign up for a free coaching call with me. It's an opportunity for us to connect, discuss your unique challenges and explore how coaching or consulting can benefit you and your team. Okay, let's get back to the show. Absolutely Well, let's kind of almost stay on that just a little bit, and then I feel like I'm a little bit all over. But I think that moral risk is there and what we're facing today again as an economy, as a business world, is AI as well. So how do you see moral risk associated with what's happening in the space of artificial intelligence as well?
Speaker 1:This is one where my co-authors love to talk. I have to say, both Harry Soukis and Matthew Hancocks have a lot to say about this. For me, I don't know. I try to get to know the world in detail so I can talk about what the actual judgments are that people are making. To me, the critical thing is the people who are designing the algorithms that run these large language models. We know from the experience of Google that they know how to make them biased. They know how they can put their thumbs on the scale to make certain results come out, and my guess is there are ways to leave the be much more laissez faire. This is let happen, what may come out. People are saying that they're mostly doing that.
Speaker 1:I believe that the moral risk taking is going to be in trying to find a balance and then trying to justify that balance, and it's good, and people are going to be putting their jobs on the line. People are going to be saying it's not entirely free speech. I think we should have this algorithm, and the team around them is going to say no, no, no, we're free speech. No, no, no, that's going to be too liberal or too conservative. It's going to allow all sorts of voices we don't want there. People are going to have to take stands on that and that's.
Speaker 1:I think that's in AI and that's with large language models. Now the same kind of stands about what counts as free speech, what counts as safe. How much risk are we going to have? And it'll get particularly dicey when we start bringing artificial intelligence into the military. And we all know we've all seen the Terminator, so we know what the ugly side of that is. But again, I don't believe it's the moral risks are going to be taken into high levels of government. I believe the moral risks are going to be taken in business management. That's part of what I'm saying Deciding what piece of artificial intelligence is safe enough and then experimenting with it and getting people to buy in and see that it's safe enough, and inventing a moral order where we become comfortable with a little bit of experimentation so long as it's got guide rails, and what precisely that is. I don't know, but that's what the leaders will determine. They'll determine what looks like sensible guide rails, what looks like sensible exploration.
Speaker 2:It's going to be fascinating to watch because even within the dilemma of the morals as you talk about it, who gets to define what those guide rails are? Let's go back to your book, because I think it's a topic. I could drive down that exit ramp for a long time. When you think about the framework, the first step is that moral risk-taking. But you also have building trust, listening for differences and speaking truth to power as the framework of creating this masterpiece. I won't you when I I won't leave it, because if folks want to purchase the book, we don't have time to talk all about all the topics. Listening for difference how can leaders effectively listen to those diverse perspectives to put them into the decision-making process?
Speaker 1:You know, the funny thing is there's in the corporate world, there's so much insulation to keep leaders from listening to those who disagree with them that it's amazing. And, moreover, there are corporate communications departments that keep leaders from saying things that would get people in disagreement with them. And you're right. So what do you do as a consultant? Let me answer it that way. The first thing I always did to get leaders listening was to get them, first of all, listening to their raving fan customers. Raving fan customers are interesting because they love the product. They tend to love the product more than the leaders themselves. So who are my raving fan customers and how are they different from me?
Speaker 1:Now, generally, you can get that through a marketing department. You can get that through a corporate communications department. They're going to let the leader speak directly to the knife. I do it in focus groups, but you can do it in any number of ways. That's the first step and from there you take on a slightly more challenging customer, slightly more challenging customer, slightly more challenging customer. And if you hire consultants, you have the consultant go out and speak to this stakeholder who finds you objectionable first, and you know, you get a read from the consultant of what this person is like and then you're really going and checking that lead. But the point is, once you get the leaders into these kinds of conversations, leaders are I mean, the whole view is a lot of people think leaders in business are just self-interested people.
Speaker 1:I find them very sensitive and they start making adjustments based on tomorrow, based on what they hear today. That's what I find extraordinary about these people. They're not just into self-interest. They hear something, they interpret it, they try something out. People might say they're too just into self-interest. They hear something, they interpret it, they try something out. People might say they're too quick to act. I think so long as they act in a more experimental way, I think it's absolutely fine. But the initial thing is get people listening to their raving fans. That's pretty easy to set up and the difference that their raving fans have from them is the first difference to get them to hear.
Speaker 2:Love that Pull it from your customers. Those are the ones that are going to know you best in terms of what's happening outside, charles, your journey.
Speaker 1:They see the future. They also see the future, and that's the thing. Okay, I'm sorry.
Speaker 2:No, and again, don't worry about interrupting. That's not a problem at all. When I think about your personal journey, charles, as I've read just a little bit about you, even that journey is a bit uncommon. Generally, folks start out in operations running a business, and then they'll consult because of the successes that they've had in running a business, and then they'll teach with regards to what they did. Now you've gone in front of that and taught first as a professor and then moved into the space of consulting, writing and ultimately running your own business as well as a consultant. Was there a moment or a catalyst for that change that came for you?
Speaker 1:uh, yeah, well, I can tell you the moment and I can. So the answer is yes, but but you want to hear the details, so uh, I'm a story guy.
Speaker 2:I like to hear the stories you know yeah, so I'm, yeah, I am too.
Speaker 1:Uh, I'm just pausing because it's a slightly complicated story. So what I? I started as a Shakespeare scholar and for me, shakespeare as a writer is all about transformation. I mean, he himself went through three transformations. He started out writing comedies and histories which were all about desire and how we handle human desire, and he invented modern desire. That is, you could desire something that wasn't good for you, or then you could be confused about what you desire, but you could never knowingly desire something that wasn't good for you Before then. You could be confused about what you desire, but you could never knowingly desire something that wasn't good for you. He invented that and his comedies play with that. Then he started writing his tragedies.
Speaker 1:And what were you dying for? What was worth dying for? In his tragedy? Your own life story. And if you read any of his four great tragedies, it's a little bit more complicated and leery. But Hamlet dies for his own life story, macbeth dies for his own life story, othello dies for his own life story, and that's what it came to mean to be a human being for a while, to be a subject who had a life story. That was important. We were all like a Shakespearean tragic character. We wanted to make our story matter. And then he went into his third phase where he wrote the romances and basically romances a tragedy that gets undone, and gets undone because you can change your story.
Speaker 1:He's an amazing writer and so I taught Shakespeare as someone teaching us how to transform ourselves, teaching us how to transform ourselves, and I was into transformation. I started doing philosophy. I've been doing philosophy with literature all along. I started writing more articles in philosophy, wrote on Heidegger and Heidegger's understanding of changes in history, and it was out of that that, working with the professor I I mostly worked with, we got an engagement with a management consultant who had had an interest in philosophy. He wanted to say what is, how does a philosopher look at innovation? And so my first book, disclosing new worlds, written with burke and fernando flores, is precisely that a philosopher's view of innovation, and that innovation is not just coming up with a new gadget, it's coming up with a change in how we see things.
Speaker 1:The big example was Gillette and developing the disposable razor blade. Disposability is what came into our culture then. Yes, of course we've got disposable razor blades and disposable other things, but disposability used to be something that was trivial, that didn't matter, and then suddenly everything was supposed to be disposable. So it was a cultural change. And so that's how we looked at change in that book. And at that time Fernando, who was running a consulting company, said Charles, how would you like to continue teaching 22-year-olds for the rest of your life about transformation, when all they want is really good jobs and a little bit of personal pleasure? Or teaching CEOs who are going to take what you bring, change their organizations, change people and change the world, and I'll pay you more. So that it was actually very difficult, because I'm somebody who wants to publish. I'm someone who likes academic publication. I loved being in front of a classroom speaking, but I made the switch then.
Speaker 2:Excellent. Thank you for sharing that. I can see how that worked in terms of understanding, especially working with people who were there watching and observing how your impact might've been greater in the space that you're in. Charles your book again. Leadership as Masterpiece Creation. Folks are going, charles your book again. Leadership as masterpiece creation. Folks are going to read your book and then they're going to set it on a bookshelf Like we've got behind us for those of you watching on YouTube and they're going to look at their bookshelf a year later and see that book sitting there. What do you want them to think? What do you want them to do a year later after reading your book?
Speaker 1:I want them to look at that book and say it inspired me to speak more courageously, to tell truth to power and, on the basis of that, take a moral risk or two. In my area, my department, my small unit of stretching people, offering something new to customers, whatever a risk where people thought I was insane or not responsible, and I made it happen and I'm going to do it again. And I'm going to do it again and I hope one day to be on the path of masterpiece creation. I should say that all the examples in the book we try to choose the most attractive examples in the book I know one leader and I've worked with one leader who's been on the road to creating a masterpiece for the last 40 years.
Speaker 1:It doesn't happen overnight Masterpiece creation and working on creating a masterpiece and he's just about got it, by the way, and now he's looking for successors and everything else that comes with having a masterpiece. That makes your life more valuable to you and to your employees. Hey, you try something. It doesn't always work. You take a risk. Sometimes risks don't pay off, sometimes they fail. But he's been doing it for 40 years and he's about got his masterpiece established and he would say that he's had a fantastic life and business. So I want people engaged in that Everybody's not going to say I read Charles Finoz's book and three years later my business became a masterpiece. I want them to be on the road, as I say in the book. I want the air that they breathe to feel like alpine air, the wine that they drink to taste better than the wine that they drank before and their lives to be better. And when you create a moral order in your business, you know the business that much more. It is like your work of poetry and you love it.
Speaker 2:Thank you, Charles. I want to ask just two more questions as we finish up today. Our time has gone by really fast. I can't believe how fast it's gone. The best way for folks to connect with you, and where do you also want them to go to purchase a copy of your book?
Speaker 1:Okay, well the best, the easiest way to go to purchase a copy of your book. Okay, well, the best, the easiest way to connect to me is LinkedIn, slash in slash, charles Spinoza. And if you do LinkedIn, charles Spinoza, I'm pretty sure any browser is going to bring you to my page. You can get that. I also have my personal email address on that page and I'm happy to take email from people using that page. Where to get the book? The easiest place to get the book and I just saw recently it has a discount is Amazon. However, barnes Noble had it and there are lots of other places that have it.
Speaker 2:I'll put a link to both of them in the show notes. Charles, I really appreciate your time that you've invested with the listeners of the Uncommon Leader podcast. I'll finish you off with the same last question give you the last word that you can provide advice to them as they listen through. But I'll give you a billboard. You can put it right there in East Manhattan. There can be a lot of people that see it in Manhattan, but you can put any message on it that you want to. What's the message that you put on that billboard and why do you put that message on there?
Speaker 1:Thank you for asking the second question. The message is today's business leaders are our moral artists or, we could add, who will give us our future? Why do I put that? Because it goes against the grain of so much that people think about business leaders. That's demeaning. The first thing is that they're self-interested. The second thing is, well, they care about various stakeholders, like their customers, their shareholders, their employees, but they care in a kind of legalistic way. They're going to treat them well by the average understanding that people have as well, and now we want them to adopt some purpose, but it's a purpose that any man in the street will see as a good purpose. It's not their purpose, it's not their use of an abused word, their authentic purpose.
Speaker 1:I want us to start seeing business leaders for what I believe they are, for what all my experience has shown. They are as people with moral imaginations, who are morally sensitive, who are designing the ways to live that we will live. And just two examples I mentioned to you earlier Google there's a moral order with psychological safety and following your dreams. In fact, getting paid to follow your dreams. That's what a good life is. Doing, that is what the good thing is. Amazon, where you're relentless, where you're constantly raising the bar. No psychological safety there. Very different moral orders, both I think admirable, both I think we could admire, both created by their leaders. Go out and create a moral order.
Speaker 2:Charles, thank you so much for your time that you invested and for those who listened all the way through. I know you've had value to those that have listened. Charles, I wish you the best going forward.
Speaker 1:Thank you very much, John. Thank you for the opportunity to speak to you and your audience. Thank you for the questions. I really appreciate it and look forward to anybody trying to reach out to me and I will respond.
Speaker 2:Thank you Great, Excellent. Thank you, Charles. And that wraps up another episode of the Uncommon Leader podcast. Thanks for tuning in today. If you found value in this episode, I encourage you to share it with your friends, colleagues or anyone else who could benefit from the insights and inspiration we've shared. Also, if you have a moment, I'd greatly appreciate if you could leave a rating and review on your favorite podcast platform. Your feedback not only helps us to improve, but it also helps others discover the podcast and join our growing community of uncommon leaders. Until next time, go and grow champions.
