How To Master Business Leadership Skills With John Cousins

Leadership isn’t just about authority—it’s about adaptability, learning, and knowing when to pivot. In this episode, I sit down with John Cousins, an investor, tech founder, and educator who has built and scaled multiple businesses. We dive into the critical business leadership skills that separate successful entrepreneurs from those who struggle, including how to transition from technical expertise to executive leadership, why financial literacy is essential, and how to leverage ownership for long-term wealth.

John shares his personal journey, from engineering to taking companies public, revealing the biggest lessons he learned along the way. We also explore the evolution of leadership in today’s workforce, the shift from traditional employment to consultant-based models, and why negotiation and communication are now more important than ever. Plus, John explains how classical education and Stoic philosophy have shaped his approach to decision-making and leadership.

If you’re looking to refine your business leadership skills, scale your career, or transition into entrepreneurship, this episode is packed with actionable insights you won’t want to miss!

Connect with John Cousins:

John Cousins has spent his career bridging the gap between technical expertise and business leadership. If you're looking to sharpen your financial and entrepreneurial skills with clear, actionab

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Visit scalewithstability.com to grab your ticket—I hope to see you there!

Right now, you can get an extra 20% off your ticket for the Scale with Stability Summit with my exclusive code CATALYTIC20 at checkout.

Visit scalewithstability.com to grab your ticket—I hope to see you there!

Right now, you can get an extra 20% off your ticket for the Scale with Stability Summit with my exclusive code CATALYTIC20 at checkout.

Visit scalewithstability.com to grab your ticket—I hope to see you there!

Chapters

• 0:38 From Engineer to Entrepreneur
• 3:24 The Power of Serendipity in Business
• 12:12 Mastering Business Fundamentals
• 20:42 Leadership in a Changing Workforce
• 29:23 The Value of Equity & Ownership
• 36:22 Lifelong Learning & Stoic Wisdom
• 44:32 Final Thoughts & How to Connect

Transcript

Dr. William Attaway: 0:37

It is such an honor today to have John Cousins on the podcast. John's an investor, a tech founder and best-selling author of Corporate Finance ASAP, as well as 60 other books. I did say 60. Having taught MBA students at universities worldwide, john is now the founder of MBA ASAP, which provides training to individuals, over 30,000 students in 165 countries and corporations including Adidas, apple, general Mills, kaiser Permanente, lyft, paypal, pinterest, mercedes-benz and Volkswagen. After serving 15 years as a CEO and CFO of two companies that he took public, john is currently general partner at Tetractys Global, a quantitative hedge fund. He's an early investor in many successful tech companies and crypto protocols. John, I'm so glad you're here. Thanks for being on the show.

John Cousins: 1:36

Well, thanks so much, Bill. It's been a pleasure. All our conversations are ready, so I'm really looking forward to this. I am as well.

Intro/Outro: 1:44

Welcome to Catalytic Leadership, the podcast designed to help leaders intentionally grow and thrive. Here is your host author and leadership and executive coach, dr William Attaway.

Dr. William Attaway: 2:01

John, I'd love to start with you sharing some of your story with our listeners, particularly around your journey and your development as a leader. How did you get started, oh?

John Cousins: 2:12

thanks, thanks, bill. Well, I started out as a small boy and as we all do, and uh, as we all do there, but my, my journey is at the primary arc, I would say is uh, from engineer, uh, electrical engineer, technical field, uh, to entrepreneur, to investor. So that's sort of the overall arching arc. But it's like the grateful day to say you know that what a long, strange trip it's been. I mean, it's nothing is ever linear, you know. You know what a long, strange trip it's been. I mean nothing is ever linear. You know you think you're going to take this linear path, but it's all these little incidental things and serendipity plays a big role and all these things. The only way you can actually see our journey, I think, for me, is retrospectively. You know, we can connect the dots only after it's happened and find that little seed developed this way, or that little inflection point, you know, put me on a different course. And this failure actually turned out to be one of the best things that ever happened to me, because then it made me reevaluate and do something else. And of course, we're story making animals put together a coherent narrative of what happened, where I think a lot of it has to do with luck and opportunities and being aware, maybe, of opportunities so that you seize them in the moment.

John Cousins: 3:32

So with that preface I started out doing engineering and that even my college was sort of. You know, you're 18 years old, you go to college. I went up to Boston and I'm really glad I ended up there. It was just the right size city for me, with lots to do, lots of big music scene, cultural scene. There's like 500, you know college institutions and thousands of students when I was up there. So lots of everything is sort of geared towards that age range and interests and it was just wonderful for me. I started out as a mechanical engineer and then I bailed on that. After a year it seemed too stifling and restrictive and became an English literature major at another university and really wanted to study the arts, study the more profound questions, deepen myself through reading and all, and then I, through serendipity or my sort of crazy urges, I got a job at a electronic music company, a synthesizer company called Arp Instruments up there, and I tried really hard to get that job. I finally landed one and so I took a semester off. I did it for the summer through that winter and then started going to school at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, mit. One of the other guys there was doing a night program that they had there for retraining, what they call tube jockeys.

John Cousins: 4:51

Back then the older generation had learned electronics through tubes and now suddenly, oh my goodness, it was all semiconductors, you know transistors and op amps and these things that were a whole new way of designing and building electrical circuitry. And so these people mid-career and stuff had to retrain. And I think that's a big part of learning how to learn so that you learn quickly, because especially in this day and age we have to be adaptive and new things are coming out all the time. We have to learn them. But also another critical skill there is unlearning and relearning. So the things that we know but just no longer serve us. We have to be able to recognize and then jettison and then relearn things. And that can be a painful process when we've put a lot of our energy and time into learning one way and suddenly that's become obsolete or marginalized and no longer serves us in some other way, psychological way even. We have to be able to recognize that, relearn and then learn again. I mean that's been my sort of lesson in all this.

John Cousins: 5:50

So I started doing that and then I went back to university and instead of staying with English literature I realized that my real interests were broader than that and so I decided to make my own major an independent major and just take the courses at that institution and other ones around, because you could take some courses and have the credits transferred. That people thought either it was a subject that really interested me or everybody was raving about that professor or whatever. And I think that's kind of the best way to learn. Sometimes If it's a really good teacher, whatever the subject is, you end up getting a lot of the knowledge more because they make it fascinating and more retainable. So I put together my program that way and sort of assembled this mosaic of courses and by the end I called it electronic music and media production. And by gum that became my first career.

John Cousins: 6:42

I moved to New York and worked in rock and roll recording studios. That's what I wanted to be around music and all. But on the technical side I had the engineering background. I remember I went for one job and I would go from recording studio to recording studio with my little resume. And one guy there said because I worked in Boston and I thought I was a big fish in a little pond kind of for that industry. And uh, he said so how many? How many gold records have you made? And his office was lined with them. I was like I haven't made any gold records, you know, I made some good music, but it wasn't like something that you know went viral or exploded and suddenly everybody loved it. And so he looked at me, like you know, and I realized now I'm in the big leagues here. This is no nonsense, you have to be at that level. So then he said wait a minute, you have a lot of electronics background and stuff. He looked at my resume and said, yeah. He said, well, we're building a new studio here. Let me bring in the you know the guy that's building that. And he came in and he said can you solder, can you do this? Yep, okay, well, you're hired and you're going to help me build. And so I got the job, but it wasn't in the artistic side of it, it was in the engineering side of it, which was just fine for me. I was around what I wanted to do and built that studio, and through that one of his friends came in and he worked for Ampex, which was this big equipment manufacturer.

John Cousins: 7:59

Early Silicon Valley company out of Redwood City California invented magnetic tape and then audio recorders and video recorders actually stole magnetic tape from the Germans after World War II. They had invented magnetic tape and the Allies were always wondering how the heck can Himmler get around and have a speech in Hamburg and then speech in Munich two hours later. Well, they were recorded and he wasn't in each place. But that was novel back then. They thought he had to be physically traveling. So they were the cutting edge at that time and they trained me up on video. I knew audio and then that became my career and then I that became a poaching.

John Cousins: 9:45

I was a poaching place for the television networks to poach engineers because Ampex would train them up on the equipment and then they'd come to work because I ended up getting poached by ABC television back when there was three networks and everything was just a sort of oligopoly of gatekeepers of broadcasting things, unlike now, right, where we can make a show like this, distribute it and there's nobody saying and the cost of it has gone down so much that it's actually democratized the distribution of information. That's right. So I worked there for about 10 years as an engineer designing and building facilities for the network. And then I decided I wanted to go back and get my MBA. I realized I picked up an annual report of ABC one day, like I can't understand, make heads or tails of these financial statements, balance sheet, income statement, this fancy glossy thing. And I know that this is important, this is how the world kind of works, and to me it was impenetrable, kind of information, like reading hieroglyphics or something. So I was like I really need to go and understand what this is. So then I went and got my MBA at the Wharton School down at University of Pennsylvania and then moved out west.

John Cousins: 10:59

After that we thought we were going to go back to New York, but my family at that time we decided to come to the southwest and have a vacation and all, and so I've been here ever since, since 1990. And luckily the internet came along and made it so I didn't feel so remote. I could live in a remote just working hard and trying to do other things. And then I ended up down here founding a little over a dozen companies. Probably 15 companies Ended up taking some of them abject failures. Some of them were relatively successful, some of them sort of mediocre like a portfolio.

John Cousins: 11:53

When you think of venture capitalists. They maybe put 10 or 12 investments down and they think that most of them are not going to make it, but one or two. The power law of the leverage of that they will make a return that'll cover all the other ones and make a good return for our limited partners and stuff. Um, and that's kind of my career has been kind of that portfolio in a way and ended up taking two companies public and so that was a nice exit strategy, um, to make uh liquid, you know liquidity for my investments. And then uh, uh, ran those companies as a cfo and CEO for 15 years and then started teaching in universities and then realizing that, oh my gosh, these books, you know the textbooks and what they're teaching, you know they're this thick on accounting or finance or marketing and you know 800 pages or something.

John Cousins: 12:47

And I realized in my career, in my personal life, I never used just a fraction of that stuff. So what I started to do is boil all that stuff down to its kind of essences and the fundamentals, like in football, blocking and tackling just the fundamentals. And that was the genesis of MBA, asap, master of Business Administration type course material ASAP, as soon as possible, you know, just very quick, so that people can start using the information, so they can comprehend it and actually understand it. Because I was having students that I'd ask them a simple, fundamental question, like I draw, okay, what's a balance sheet? And they'd panic. You know debits, credits, assets. You know they would just throw out buzzwords and they really didn't understand. So I'd go through it with them for maybe 10 minutes and the light bulbs would go off and I, time after time, I'd be saying like I've taken four courses in this field and this is the first time I really understand clearly what that is, because you know understanding the forest through the trees kind of thing. You know, if you have too many details you can't get a overview, a 30,000 foot view or whatever of what's going on. So that's what I started trying to put together.

John Cousins: 13:56

And then, of course, technology was advancing too. So Amazon had KDP, kindle, direct Publishing, and suddenly I realized I could. Just, I was writing up little white papers and PowerPoint slides that kind of almost became an outline for a book. You know, it would be like you know from this side to that side and it's like this is a great way to outline things and then writing those out and just publishing them. You know, just upload a Word document or whatever up there and they have a cover creator that they have and you can make a quick cover and suddenly I was a published author and for the paperback books that they as for the Kindle side and the paperback books that they do, it's called POD, print on demand. They print one copy when somebody orders it. So before that you'd have to print. I did this with records, a lot with CDs. You have to print maybe a thousand copies to cover the fixed cost of the printing press and you'd have these boxes. I had boxes in my garage, it's like somebody ordered one.

John Cousins: 14:51

Oh, now I have to go out and put them in a mailer, send them off, and it was really tedious. Now, suddenly, amazon will print one. You'll have no inventory costs, no working capital tied up in inventory, and we'll ship it out and we'll put the money in your bank account at the end of the month. It's like what a great deal you know. And so that you say I just published my third book and in a way it's because the technology platform was there for me to reach people. And every time I sold a book I was so excited that, you know, someone was interested in that, and then it would spur me to write more. So it was more of a instead of a disciplined push to do things. It was like a pull. You know, it's like you like that, I'll do more of that. And they also have a. There's a gamification side of that. Where they have I get paid some money from. They have Kindle Unlimited it's called, and if you are a member of Prime or whatever it is, you can read all the Kindles for free, you know. And then there's a pool of money and, depending on how many minutes of reading or how many pages they do, by pages that people read. You get a prorated share of their funds each month, which is kind of neat. But for me the fun part of it is you see, today, you know 987 pages are read and you know, you know 987 pages are read and you know, tomorrow, 432 pages are read, and it's so exciting to think to me. That's even doesn't pay me as much as when somebody buys a book, but I actually know that somebody actually read, that they just buy it and then you know I'll read it next week and they never, it's like, and so it's kind of game. There's a gamification thing. Like they say when you scroll on the internet that, uh, you know there's these little dopamine rushes you get. Or when you get an email or a text, ooh, maybe it's something fun, and uh, and to me it's those little dopamine rushes of that. You know, wow, somebody actually read my work today and it tells you what books they read it from. And the same thing.

John Cousins: 16:50

The platform came up Udemy and these other platforms for courses, and I would just record my whiteboard lectures on my little iPhone and then edit them on iMovie, which is a $5 plugin for my Apple computer, and then upload them along with the books and create online courses. It all happened organically and it happened because the technical platforms were there for me to ride on top of, just like Uber or something, lyft or something. They couldn't exist until the iPhone had a technical platform, a matching engine between I have a backseat of my car and I would need a ride downtown, oh, we can match up together. And so it needed the platform before that business model was actually feasible. And so that's kind of my journey.

John Cousins: 17:40

You know, in a long we've laughed about it and, from a leadership standpoint, where it really started actually back at ABC, was when I really started to become a leader, was when I really started to become a leader I was in. There was a union that did all of the work, the technical work, the soldering, the pulling cables, all that. I would create the plans and all that, and then I'd have these teams of 40, 50, you know union, highly trained technical people that would go out and start to build these things and I would be in charge of those teams. And that was very exciting and fun. I mean being in like, say, the Olympics we did in Sarajevo in 84, you know team that were doing all this kind of work and you'd see all these guys running around and they were, you know, doing the instructions of what I had said and they'd come with some questions. We'd look at the plans and you know, and it was always just so fun and exciting and really getting a good relationship with them.

John Cousins: 18:36

I was on the side that was the executive side, and there was some tension there, you know, between the suits you know, I wore a suit, you know and the technical people that actually do the work, you know, and they thought, you know that some of my peers would look down on those guys and just order them around Like what people, how they treat a waiter, and then those people would reset that obviously who the heck I think he is, and stuff, and so there would be this friction and I understood that and recognized that and really became genuinely friends with all of these. It was mostly men, and you know, but men and women that I worked with and and and so I think that really helped to reduce the friction. We got things done faster and they would go the extra mile for me and I would see that you know where they wouldn't do it. There would be some passive aggressiveness there. You know that they would undermine my colleagues, you know attempts. And so I started to realize that's when I started to how do we interact with with, if there's a hierarchy, with the people above you. You know, managing up is another thing too, but managing down and leading and so that you really get things done and and it's done in a, in a, in a less frictional way, so that things run smoothly.

John Cousins: 19:54

And I carried that over after I went to, you know, back to Wharton. That was two years of sort of sequestered in a learning environment, you know, beautiful campus and just thinking about all these kinds of things. And it was good to have that time to sort of reevaluate and think about what I had done for the last 10, 12 years at Ampex and ABC and what I wanted to do in the future and at the same time learning all of these business skills. Then when I came out, I realized that I didn't want to go back to work for a company I didn't like. I didn't fit in in a corporate environment. It seemed too boxed in. For all that, abc was great.

John Cousins: 20:32

I was on the road. Six, some one year, nine months of the year I was on the road living out of a suitcase, you know, and I looked around at the guys that were. I was in my mid-20s, I was really young for it. Actually, looking back, most of the guys were in their mid-40s, you know something in that range, you know. And after every show would break down, say you know, kentucky Derby or World Series or a political convention, we'd be, you know, someplace for a month or two weeks. As soon as it would break, everybody would take out back then it was their little book of all the flights, call up, say okay, give me another flight, you know. And they'd be off.

John Cousins: 21:19

And I looked at these guys you know that were like 20 years my senior and they were all living out of suitcase, divorced alcoholic gamblers, you know, they gamble on all these events that they were at, you know, and I, I, I realized, is that what I want to be, you know? And the answer was no, you know. I just don't want to. I don't want to end up like that. So that's when I really thought I'm going to bail and go back to B school, go to business school and change my life. And also I was developing as the engineers.

John Cousins: 21:45

What we would do was our clients were sports and news, and my boss was a guy named Rune Arlitch, was the big boss, he was the head of wild world, of of sports and all that, and then he brought that sports kind of showmanship to the news division and and they were always, you know, the production people who were my clients basically always wanted to push the state of the art. You know they always wanted to. Maybe we can get a better slow motion thing, maybe get a better isolation camera, maybe we can get some cool microphone or a little camera that we could put on the back of a bobsled or whatever. And so then I would go out and talk to the different equipment manufacturers and help them to develop their next generation of equipment, and then they would make something and we'd iterate it and then so I started to learn that development, technical development process, and then they'd go sell a bazillion of these things to everybody and I was like I want to capture some of that value, you know, and be on that side of the fence.

John Cousins: 22:39

And so that's what I decided to do is build technical companies to trade your time for money working for a company or something, but really to work where you have some sort of equity, ownership in the enterprise, so that the value is accruing to you. And so that's really important, I think, because obviously think about how a company works. The only reason they hire someone is if they think that that person is creating more value than you're giving them in return and compensation and that excess surplus value goes to the shareholders or the owners or whatever. So that surplus value, depending how big it is or small it is, you're not capturing. And so if you work for yourself or you're an owner to some degree, then you're accruing that value. The same thing if you invest in the stock market suddenly you buy 10 shares of Tesla stock and Elon Musk you're his boss, he's working for you.

John Cousins: 23:46

He's working for you and that's just amazing to me that we have that opportunity to work to invest in the stock market. So I mean investing and then also owning some ownership in your company. I think Naval Robinkant, who's a great thinker, said that you have to have equity. You have to have equity and hitting that home, and I really agree with that.

John Cousins: 24:01

And as I started to build companies, then one of my, you know, you hire people as part of leadership. You have to see, is this a good fit and all? And many times I would think my intuition is right. You know, see, is this a good fit and all? And many times I would think my intuition is right. You know, and you'd hire somebody, that that person is really smart. Well, they were very good at the interview process and inflating their can-do spirit or whatever, and then they would not really perform. You know, and then other people that you'd hire and you think, well, they're at this mediocre level, but they could do a good job. They're a steady Eddie, whatever you know, and suddenly they start growing.

John Cousins: 24:35

You know, and I always really love that about leadership is to help nurture talent and to give people just a little bit, not too big of a responsibility, that you're setting them up to fail, but enough extra responsibility that they have to grow and push beyond their boundaries and do something. And then giving them room to say you know, if you fail, if something goes wrong, just tell me right away. And when people feel comfortable, they report back and say you know what? This isn't working? You know, we thought it was Okay, great, what can we do to fix it? And they realize I'm not going to get fired, I'm not going to get yelled at or not going to get belittled in front of everybody else, that we're really all moving in the same direction, communicating a vision that everybody buys into and is excited about, and then using that as the criteria for what works and what doesn't. And then to see there's nothing more satisfying to me than to see somebody grow in their confidence, in their capabilities, in their skill sets, so that they can actually take on more. And then, once that happens, then some people have this appetite for give me more, I want to do more. I'm really liking this, you know. This feels great, you know, and that, from a leadership standpoint, I consider that angel's pay.

John Cousins: 25:49

You know, that's the kind of satisfaction that you get from being a leader, creating a vision, communicating that vision, getting people excited and all sort of marching in the same direction and helping people to expand, to understand almost to themselves that they have more capabilities than they think, and doing that in an incremental way so that they're not scared. Think, and doing that in an incremental way so that they're not scared, that you know there's a thing called, you know, flow states, and the flow channel is you know you want to get into that place where you're really completely everything's going right and you know you're concentrating, everything's flowing. You have to have a task that's a little bit more challenging than you think your capabilities are, but not so much that it's too much, so that you're not overly bored doing the same thing or you're not completely freaked out because it's way too much for you to do. And that sort of flow channel finding that for leading people, I think is really critical Meeting them where they're at and helping them to grow and get better.

John Cousins: 26:51

And the other part of leadership too, I think, in a company is creating jobs and saying, wow, I'm giving these 10 people a livelihood, you know, and their families, and how great is that. And I want to make this something where they feel happy to come to work and they also are growing and learning and um and and making a good living and uh, and so there's so many satisfactions from leadership that I found and, and like you say, catalytic leadership you're thinking on it is like a uh, a uh catalytic converter or something where you're you're helping people. It's like alchemy or something you're helping them to to grow, and there's a psychological ecology obviously behind that and all, and communication skills and and confidence in something that it, whatever you're trying to do, has to seem relatively feasible so that people think, oh, that's a, that's an achievable goal, we can actually do that instead of like, like I want to build some feathered wings and we're going to fly to the moon, let's go.

Dr. William Attaway: 27:55

That's so good, john. There's so much wisdom in what you shared, and I know that's hard won. I often tell clients that there's no such thing as a wasted experience, that everything that has happened in your life has contributed Good, bad, ugly, indifferent. All of it has contributed to making you who you are today and learning how to leverage those experiences in a way that they're not just for your benefit but for the benefit of other people. That's a theme and a thread that I see through so much of your story. You know working in academia, seeing the challenges, seeing the struggles, experiencing them yourself firsthand and then saying, hey, how can I move to the solution side of this? How can I become a part of a solution that doesn't exist yet? And then, as an entrepreneur, doing what entrepreneurs do best create jobs? You know so many of those threads just recur again and again in your story. I love that.

John Cousins: 28:54

Oh, thanks, bill, that's a wonderful way to sum it up and very eloquent.

Dr. William Attaway: 29:00

Let me ask you this you have to lead in a different way today than you did 5, 10, 15 years ago, than you did five, 10, 15 years ago, and the same thing is going to be true five years from now. You know your teams, your companies like they need you to continue to grow and develop. How do you stay on top of your game and level up with the new leadership skills that your team, your?

John Cousins: 29:26

clients, your companies are going to need you to have.

John Cousins: 29:31

That's a great question. What clients your companies are going to need you to have? That's a great question. What I've seen happen again technology has been such a driver of organizational development and organizational behavior. It used to be that things were much more hierarchical and you'd have these different steps. Now things organizations have become flatter, with less steps in between, and there's a number of good reasons for that. You know, sometimes you have too much middle management and things, and one of the things now, back in the day, it would be like do this, do that.

John Cousins: 30:00

You know, in the military you have to have clear, direct order lines because things can't be questioned and negotiated and discussed and sort of come to consensus because things have to be done right now and so you have to have a plan and that plan has to be executed.

John Cousins: 30:21

I remember Harry Truman supposedly said when Eisenhower was coming in to be president and he came in after Truman and Ike was, and Ike was the head of Supreme Commander of Allied Theaters and this top military guy, and Truman said poor Ike, he's going to come in here and he's going to order people and say do this, you do that, all this efficient, great stuff, and none of it's going to happen Because the government was more squishy and all these sort of palace intrigue and different agendas, and so you can't really tell people to do it, and so that is kind of a. There's different in different organizations, there's different skill sets that are required to get things done, and you know, and so what? Now? The way that I, that I operate, is I don't have any employees. I abandoned that. And because with employees you have to have this static, you have to have a recurring revenue stream that's stable enough and predictable enough that you can actually pay those salaries and that can be. I wake up a lot at night sometimes when you am I going to be able to make payroll next week or something with a startup. So now it's a lot easier to get consultants and independent contractors to do work, and I really like that kind of model for me now to assemble the mosaic of talent that I need for a particular thing and then, when that thing goes to whatever the next step is, reassemble it and see are these skill sets still the skill sets I need? No, these guys, thanks very much, and I'm going to bring in another team that is good for that, for this next tier. And then it's a variable cost.

John Cousins: 31:53

You know, if you can't do it, then you cut off that contract or whatever, and they're used to that now, and you can really get the expertise you need when you need it. Now, that is a very flat organization, I mean it's just there's no hierarchy at all. So then, what I found is really becoming critical is communication skills and negotiation skills, because you have to negotiate with people to convince them that what you need done is worth doing. You know, and they're not just doing it for a paycheck or something Right. So it's, you know, in life you don't get what you want, you get what you negotiate.

John Cousins: 32:28

And so really understanding how to negotiate with folks so that you're both thinking about how do we solve this problem and you're both. It's not like you did this wrong, you know. It's like here's the problem, how do we address it and solve it, and and move forward and and then creating good measurement, type of uh things that you know okrs and kpis, you know. You know, yes, key, key performance indices, so you know what your objectives are. And once you have things metrics what gets measured gets managed.

John Cousins: 33:00

As Peter Drucker said, if you have good measurement things, then you can course correct and see how you're performing, and that's a good way to say what need you know what's the goal, how are we going to measure success? And then here's why we need to do this, and are you the you know interested in doing that? And so it's communication skills, creating a compelling vision that people want to follow, and then negotiating some sort of the terms and conditions of how we're going to go forward with this. And then feedback loops based on metrics of how to course correct and, if something's working, double down on resources on that. If something's not working, either stop that initiative or refine it in some way that you know it's just running a bunch of experiments, but you have to have the, the feedback to say, see whether the experiment you're running is uh, is positive or negative and successful or not, uh, and incrementally then improving on those type of things.

John Cousins: 33:59

I found that's a really good way to lead and manage and you know those two things too the the uh. You know lead leadership and management. You. They're kind of yin and yang, you know they go together, you know, and those kind of skills. To be a good leader, I think you also have to have pretty good management skills, because you have compel people to do things instead of just demanding that they do it or else they're going to be fired or something. You know that that type of sort of damocles hanging over people's heads is not a good way to get the best out of people. I've found you know they're 100 yeah, the.

John Cousins: 34:46

You don't want to get in a situation where you're paying people just enough that they don't quit and they're doing just enough work. So you don't want to get in a situation where you're paying people just enough that they don't quit and they're doing just enough work so you don't fire them.

Dr. William Attaway: 34:53

You know it's a dysfunctional kind of you know, and yet many people are exactly there because you have what you tolerate and that's what they have tolerated and so that's what they have. So you know, in the mindset that you have as going through your journey, you are a continual learner and I think that that is evident to anybody who spends more than five minutes talking with you. I'm curious is there a book that has made a big difference in your journey that you would recommend to the leaders who are listening?

John Cousins: 35:24

Oh, my goodness, you know I meant to say that in the last thing. You know that one of the ways to grow, I think the superpower is and I can see your bookshelf and you know the reading is a superpower and I think it's something that gets discounted in this day and age where you know you can look things up on Google, watch a video, scroll for a while and you get the superficial information Right, but you don't really get. You know, reading a book you're actually getting into this intimate discourse with someone else's mind Right. When we go back and read something like you know from 2000 years ago or something you know and you know like like Plato or Seneca or through the Middle Ages, and say, wow, a lot of these problems and issues that we have, they may look a little bit different, they may look modern, but they're just fundamental things that thinkers have been thinking about for millennia. It's a comforting process to it.

John Cousins: 36:31

I think it eliminates loneliness, alienation. Solitude is one thing that's great and reading is a solitary pursuit and loneliness and alienation are two other things. They're not like solitude and I think there's such a comforting thing in being able to read and realize that you're not alone that other people have had these things and also the articulateness of great writers. When you read something, it's like I always thought that in a way, but I never was able to put it that succinctly, and oh man.

John Cousins: 37:09

I have to highlight that and take a note and put that into my daily note. I keep notes of now. I keep them on my phone notes, you know, when I come across something that I really find compelling, I type it in or copy and paste it in so that I can go back and look at that. You know, says it very succinctly, like a little maxim or something that helps us and motivate us in those times when, you know, because we all go through these peaks and troughs and you know you want something that you can rely on. So, with that said, you know Mad Dog Mattis, the military general, you know he said that if you haven't read hundreds of books, you are functionally illiterate and your personal experience, you will fail because your personal experience will not be enough to sustain you. You have to have these broader experiences, and what more efficient way to gain experience than through reading?

John Cousins: 38:00

It just is a way to really gather wisdom through the ages. And so, with all that said gosh to pick one book, that's always a tough one for me. No-transcript was that kind of guy and he wrote those for himself, you know.

John Cousins: 38:46

Basically, you know, and, uh, because there wasn't a publishing industry back then or anything that's right and and there is, he wrote you know that, uh, one can live a good life even in a palace, you know people think that you know, when you're wealthy and all that, then you're going to solve your problems, but you're still the same person and there's lots more temptations and distractions or whatever else that will present themselves to you in that type of a environment. And he was able to take away all of those worldly kind of things. And really, what does it mean to be a good person? What does it mean to lead well? What are my responsibilities in this realm? How do I handle criticism properly, all those kind of things?

John Cousins: 39:29

And the same thing with Seneca. Seneca was like 100 years before him. He was the teacher to Nero actually, but he was the wealthiest person in Rome and not many people you know don't realize that. You know, it's like he was the wealthiest person in Rome and he also he would do things like he would eat the, you know, for a couple of days a month, you know, eat the basic food, dress in the most basic clothes and sleep outside and stuff like that, so that he could really realize.

John Cousins: 39:56

You know, is this the state that I'm so worried about?

John Cousins: 39:59

If I lost all my money and my worldly possessions, that all of a sudden I'd be impoverished?

John Cousins: 40:04

You know, this isn't that half bad, you know, I can still, I'm still myself, I can think my thoughts and all, and so I think that those two books are very powerful and they're antique, they're ancient wisdom that stood the test of time and everybody throughout the ages, like the founders of the United States, they had a classical education, they were steeped in this kind of information when they thought about what does it take to create a good government that will be beneficial to the people, all those kinds of things. So to go back and have a foundation of that type of wisdom and knowledge that everybody I think everybody else through generations upon generations have also relied on, this, I think, is a good place to sort of maybe start. You know, because then you have a cultural literacy with all of these people through history. You know, because then you have a cultural literacy with all of these people through history. You know that also. You know, in the Middle Ages they read that you know.

Dr. William Attaway: 40:58

Absolutely, and I think you keyed in on this. This has been a standard of education for a very long time, for a reason. This is why, when my wife and I homeschooled our daughters, you know, from kindergarten through high school, we used a classical education model, because we wanted to introduce them to the classics, introduce them to classical ways of thinking, because there's so much value there and I think that that has benefited them beyond. For that reason, this is timeless wisdom.

John Cousins: 41:27

That's very incredibly insightful, bill, and that's a great way to educate. I think that's excellent. I totally agree with you, in sync with that hard-won wisdom and insight that you have gained over the years.

Dr. William Attaway: 41:55

Thank you for sharing that with me and with our listeners. I know many people are going to want to find out more about what you're doing and connect with you. What is the best way for them to do that? Oh, thanks, Bill.

John Cousins: 42:05

Well, the best way is my website, wwwmba-asapcom mba-asapcom. I said it wrong, but that's the best place to get in touch with me. That's where my courses, my online course, and also to subscribe to my email list and things and from there you can respond to me to emails and I respond to everybody. So I love to talk to people. So anybody that's interested, that's. That's the best way to sort of entree into all the different things.

Dr. William Attaway: 42:37

Wonderful. We'll have that link in the show notes. Thanks so much, bill, thank you. Thank you for today. Thank you for being a conduit of what you've learned instead of just a reservoir of it. We have all benefited from that.

John Cousins: 42:50

I really appreciate it. Bill, you're wonderful to talk to. I agree, like you said, I talked to you for hours.

Dr. William Attaway: 42:55

Thanks for joining me for this episode today. As we wrap up, I'd love for you to do two things. First, subscribe to this podcast so you don't miss an episode, and if you find value here, I'd love it if you would rate it and review it. That really does make a difference in helping other people to discover this podcast. Second, if you don't have a copy of my newest book, Catalytic Leadership, I'd love to put a copy in your hands. If you go to catalyticleadershipbookcom, you can get a copy for free. Just pay the shipping so I can get it to you and we'll get one right out.

Dr. William Attaway: 43:31

My goal is to put this into the hands of as many leaders as possible. This book captures principles that I've learned in 20 plus years of coaching leaders in the entrepreneurial space, in business, government, non-profits, education and the local church. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn to keep up with what I'm currently learning and thinking about. And if you're ready to take a next step with a coach to help you intentionally grow and thrive as a leader, I'd be honored to help you, Just go to catalyticleadershipnet to book a call with me. Stay tuned for our next episode next week. Until then, as always, leaders choose to be catalytic.

Intro/Outro: 44:15

Thanks for listening to Catalytic Leadership with Dr William Attaway. Be sure to subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts so you don't miss the next episode. Want more? Go to catalyticleadershipnet.