Brad Johnson: Welcome back to another episode of Do Business, Do Life. I’m here with Keith Ferrazzi. Welcome to the show, Keith.
Keith Ferrazzi: Brad, thanks a lot. Looking forward to this time and getting to know your community a little bit.
Brad Johnson: Well, awesome. And what’s crazy is you already have a bit, we’ve got a mutual friend in Chris Abeyta who’s gone through one of your courses, really taking Never Eat Alone into the real world and actually utilizing it in business. So, as we dive in here, I know our time is short, so we’re just going to get straight to it. Your number one New York Times bestseller, Never Eat Alone, I believe that dropped 20 years ago now, 2005.
Keith Ferrazzi: Exactly right, yeah.
Brad Johnson: That’s wild. I remember first getting into this industry and that was one of the top books on, basically, every list in the financial services space. And it’s evolved a ton. It’s now a real-world course with one of our Triad members, Chris, was really like, “Man, you got to get Keith on the show and dive into this because this is game-changing stuff.” So, maybe we start there, kind of at the beginning and evolve into your latest book, Never Lead Alone, but what are some of the learnings over the last two decades of Never Eat Alone and how financial advisors can take the concepts and put them into practice?
Keith Ferrazzi: I do a lot of speaking for financial advisor communities and a lot of coaching. And I would say a number of things, number one would still is 100% true, this is a relationship game. Trust is generated by real relationships, and we’ve got to recognize that two arms, two legs and the wisdom or insight you have about investments is going to make you a commodity. What’s going to come through is the trust that you build, the loyalty that you build, the perception that the other person has that you truly care about their success in all aspects. In all aspects. Not just their financial success, but you care about their kids’ success. You care about their personal wellbeing and happiness. And that really involves your willingness and capability to open the kimono a bit, to be a bit vulnerable, to invite a real relationship, right?
Now, it all starts with generosity. It all starts with you being a person that someone looks at and says, if I’m in a relationship with this person, my life will be elevated. And I love your podcast name because it’s not just business, it is life. And when it comes to my money, I’m actually going to be having a conversation with a potential financial advisor later this afternoon because I just got married last weekend and…
Brad Johnson: Congratulations.
Keith Ferrazzi: Yeah, thank you. And so, I’ve got to start looking at my financial future a little differently in this new world that I’m in. And what I want to know is that this person truly has my back. I want to know that this person understands that I’ve got six sons and that person is committed to the success of my children. I want to know that that person’s committed to my business. I want to know that if this person has relationships in their financial advisory network, that they’re going to open doors of their network to me to co-create cool things that can happen among their client base, right?
So, it starts with your recognition that you are incredibly generous. I call it the generosity of pyramid, that you are incredibly generous in all aspects of this person’s life. Now, the next level up is once you’ve gotten somebody’s attention because they really believe that you’ve got their back and you’re trying to make them successful in all areas of their life, then you’ve got to be more vulnerable. You’ve got to be more open. If I am talking to somebody that thinks they’re up on a pedestal or thinks they have to be an expert all the time, I’m not going to be able to open up my fears about my relationship and my conversation around a prenup and anything that may be much more sensitive, or my relationships with each of my kids and some of the struggles I may be having. My boys are all through foster care and adoption. It’s a complicated relationship with some of the kids. One of my boys have been to jail three times. And so, am I going to get into that degree of vulnerability if you’re not willing to be vulnerable with me? And so, how do you build that kind of connectivity at that level?
Brad Johnson: Keith, what’s the balance? Because it’s kind of that extraordinary, yet ordinary, because if somebody, I mean, obviously, with your level of success, somebody that’s dealing with your finances, they have to be extraordinary at what they do. But back to the vulnerableness and being relatable, what’s that balance in between those two?
Keith Ferrazzi: Look, the commoditization in the financial services segment is pretty significant, and what’s going to differentiate is whether I feel that someone’s going to put more of their brain on the weekend toward me than somebody else will. And certainly, I can do all of my research and we have got all of the numbers, et cetera, but as markets ebb and flow, it requires me to understand that this person really has my back and that’s where the vulnerability kicks in. If I don’t feel that this person, if I really know this person, then I’m not going to trust them.
And one of the things that I’ve done when working with financial advisors is I get financial advisors to meet on a weekly basis among each other and do something that I call 5/5?5, get four financial advisors in a peer-to-peer coaching group, have them meet in a small group once a week, once a month for an hour. Each one gets a 15-minute spotlight. So, the first five minutes, Brad shows up and says, “Here’s something right now in my business I’m struggling with.” Could be a client, could be a prospect, could be something inside, and how their team’s working, et cetera. “Here’s where I’m struggling.” The team peppers them with questions for five minutes.
And then the team gives them really straightforward double-barrel feedback and what they think Brad should do. And then it’s done. Brad doesn’t have to do it. He’s not going to be held accountable for it.
Brad Johnson: So, recap, five-minute share out, five-minute peppering of questions, and then five minutes of feedback, group sourced.
Keith Ferrazzi: Yep, yep. And then you move on to the next person. So, in one hour, you get four people to go through it. One of my books years ago, Who’s Got Your Back, I studied peer-to-peer support groups and how powerful they are in the transformation of people’s lives, Weight Watchers and why it works better in weight loss because of the peer-to-peer support, YPO forums and how they help people transform their businesses, et cetera, AA meetings and how they take people from the gutter to a place of survival and thriving out of where they were before because of the peer-to-peer support. And I realized very few people really have that in their lives. And if we could start to create that in formats for how to do that effectively, so this simple 5/5/5 tool is a good one.
We did this at Merrill Lynch. We started the management, like we took all of the management layer of Merrill Lynch and put them into 5/5/5 groups, these lifeline groups. I call them co-elevation groups, where they’re committed to pushing each other higher. That’s the commitment. We’re in here. We’re going to give each other candid butt kicking feedback because we’re going to help each other to be successful, these co-elevation groups.
And they were during the pandemic and it was all focused on whether or not they could break through in net new accounts, right? So, you had managers running regions, coaching each other in 5/5/5 format on how they got their net new accounts to accelerate because Merrill Lynch had been flat on net new accounts for five years. Then we cascaded it down to the FAs themselves. They got into these, talking about net new accounts.
What we found was that the regions where the managers were in these, they increased their net new accounts by 20%. The actual financial advisors who stayed in these groups, they increased their net new accounts by 50%. Now, that’s written up in a book that I wrote a number of years ago called Leading Without Authority. But this idea of peer-to-peer coaching is incredibly powerful. And it’s one of the things I’ve learned since writing Never Eat Alone. You asked me about my 20-year journey. This peer-to-peer coaching element is an incredible opportunity for financial advisors. And I would imagine that the Triad group that you all do something very simple.You create that forum for peer-to-peer coaching.
Brad Johnson: Yeah, Keith, what I was going to hit there, I mean, I’ve been in finance since 2007, and the most successful financial advisors out there use some format of what you just talked about, where it’s the old Jim Rohn quote, “You’re the average of the five people you surround yourself with.” And when you take best practices and crowdsource them based on real-world issues or gaps that you’re facing, it’s as long as you’re in the right room. Now, if you’re getting advice from people that also have the same problem, maybe that’s not who you want to get your advice from, but I’ve seen that work over and over as long as you’re in the right room with the right peers to get that feedback from. I love that format because it just boom, boom, boom, and 15 minutes, massive breakthroughs.
Keith Ferrazzi: And it doesn’t require a manager overseeing it or an external coach, et cetera, right? The next thing I learned, is similar in nature, but it’s about crowdsourcing. It’s how do you move from just being a networker to building community? So, for instance, today, where I spend most of my time is in helping teams be high performing. We coach executive teams. And I wanted to make sure that instead of just running around networking, which is lead gen, which is what made me very successful when I wrote this book, Never Eat Alone, I wanted to build a community of business leaders who wanted to use this new era of AI to radically reinvent their company.
So, I created a community called RIC, Radical Innovators Collaborative. And RIC invites business leaders, very senior business leaders of major organizations to come and share in small peer-to-peer groups their struggles and their successes, their victories and their setbacks around how they’re using AI to double productivity, to decrease their operating expenses running their business by 30% to radically re-engineer their supply chains, et cetera. So, I started in small format where I started having dinners where these folks would come together and I would identify ones that were really particularly focused in this area, and then I started expanding it.
And now, we’ve got 90 of the Fortune 500 organizations in this community, and it’s all focused on peer-to-peer support. What am I to them? I’m the generous host that made it happen. I’m the facilitator, right? But I don’t have to be showing up and preaching. I’m not selling my high-performing teamwork, but that is a massive pool for lead generation for what I do within this group. So, I found that I certainly am still a pretty good networker. But building community is a more elegant way to do exactly that.
So, if I was an Asian woman in Chicago, I might start hosting a community of Asian female executives. If I was a financial advisor, then I would help this group of Asian female executives help coach each other to be successful. If I were a religious man in Dallas, I might start hosting a men’s prayer breakfast, right? And the intention is to serve the community, not sell themselves. And by serving the community, you build the relationship, you build the permission to have a conversation with them about what you do.
Brad Johnson: I love that concept and you’ve heard it forever in finance, the riches are in the niches, and kind of finding the key connections that build relationship more quickly. If we were just to like role play that here real quick, I’m the guy that you want to target to join the prayer group down in Dallas. How would you open up that conversation with me to say, “Hey, I want to invite you in. And it’s not really about me and growing my network, it’s about creating a community where we all win,” what would that sound like?
Keith Ferrazzi: Well, again, I’m going to step in to role for a moment. So, I’m Keith, I’m living in Dallas. I’m a financial advisor. Brad, I get the sense from you that you’re a person of faith. Is that accurate?
Brad Johnson: Yeah.
Keith Ferrazzi: And I’d say yes. I’ve got an amazing blessing in my life. The Lord has blessed me with some amazing people in my life that have really helped me elevate in who I am as a father, in who I am as a husband, and in who I am as a leader. And we get together on a periodic basis. And what we do is we focus on prayer for our lives, we focus on giving each other constructive advice and thoughtful insights. And I would love for you to come to one of those sessions and really get to know some of these extraordinary people that have really been impactful to me, and more importantly, are impactful to each other. Would you join us, Brad, some breakfast sometime?
Brad Johnson: Sounds like an amazing group to be a part of. Let’s go. When is it?
Keith Ferrazzi: And I might even go one step further, I might even have said something like, there have been times when I’ve personally struggled in my marriage and it was this group of men that helped me get through it as it may have with integrity. There have been times that I have lapsed in my integrity and my marriage, and this group of individuals got me on the right track.
Brad Johnson: That’s that vulnerableness that you were talking about. Yeah, opening yourself up a little bit. Yeah.
Keith Ferrazzi: Beautiful invitation to say, wow, who do I have that I can do that with? Who do I have that I can fire on all authentic cylinders with who could be there without shame but with grace with each other.
Brad Johnson: I love that. And I’ll tell you one of the things I’ve learned as a leader, because your natural tendency is almost like, I’ve got to be perfect, I’ve got to be all buttoned up, I’ve got to be the guy on stage leading the team, always having the right answer and what I’ve noticed when you invite somebody into that vulnerable space, like, hey, I don’t always have the answer. Sometimes I struggle just like you do. It’s like, oh, this is a normal human I can have a conversation with. Not somebody I have to feel like I have to be perfect in front of. What other psychology have you seen? Because you’ve formed a lot of these different groups and sat with a lot of leaders, what else does that open up in your opinion?
Keith Ferrazzi: So, let me shift now for a moment. I do believe that a critical element of all of us as leaders is being missed in most leadership courses. So, Brad, you and I know that as a leader, a good leader needs to give feedback of the team. But what I have learned in my watching great leaders is great leaders get the team to give each other feedback. Good leaders, they hold the team accountable. Great leaders make sure that the team hold each other accountable. Great leaders make sure that the team cares about each other’s energy, that the team has each other’s back, that the team celebrates each other, not just the leader celebrating. And that’s the shift of this new book. The new book is called 10 Shifts from Leadership to Teamship.
I want to teach leaders how to help their team step up and meet them in leadership, elevate by 30% as a team to achieve disproportionate outcomes that they could have never achieved before, but they do it because they’re going to cross the finish line together. They have a sense of shared responsibility. I call it co-elevation. Over 24 years of coaching teams have identified that the highest performing teams are committed to the mission, but they’re also committed to pushing each other to get there. And that’s a powerful shift. And it is very different than traditional leadership that is hub and spoke. And I know that a lot of financial advisors, like a lot of entrepreneurs put way too much weight and carry way too much water themselves when they should be dispersing that and expecting the team to step up and meet them.
Brad Johnson: I would think a piece of that leadership lesson is when you are growing leaders on your team and they’re figuring it out, just like all of us have had to figure it out and grow as leaders. And by the way, that work is never done. You’ve never arrived there. But I’m assuming a part of that is, hey, also when I stepped into leadership, I sometimes felt like this imposter syndrome or like, I didn’t always have it figured out, which goes back to that vulnerableness we were talking about. I’m assuming that’s a big piece of your leadership.
Keith Ferrazzi: It is, but also the practices. So, they’re not just the mindsets, it’s not just the behavioral stuff. A lot of it is the practices. So, for instance, I coach teams in Chapter 4 of this book that if you want a team that have each other’s back, you need to do a monthly energy check. Everybody goes around and shares on a scale of 0 to 5, where’s my energy right now? And what’s bringing it down? It’s important to prescribe the vulnerability. Everybody go around and share what’s bringing their energy down. And somebody will talk about a mother in assisted living who has dementia. Another person will talk about a kid that they’re struggling with. Somebody else will talk about some client that they’re struggling with.
But the point is that we put it on the table and we say, as a team, “We have each other’s back.” So not just me, but the team will be able to check in, how’s your mom? The team will be able to check in and say, how’s your daughter doing? And so, that conversation where the team starts to take responsibility for each other’s energy, a very powerful shift that activates the vulnerability, right? So, vulnerable is just a phrase, but do an energy check, that’s the way we design the book. The book is designed 10 shifts that a leader needs to make and every shift has a hero story of somebody who did it well, and then some simple practices that the leader can do, like an energy check.
Or another one is a thing called a candor break. Often when we’re in a heated discussion about an important issue, people are not fully present with their full courage and candor in the room. There’s a lot of conflict avoidance, and as a result, you don’t get to hear people’s points of view, and that’s a real loss for a leader. A candor break is when you stop in the middle of it and say, let’s pause for a second, turn to the person next to you, go into breakout rooms of two, whatever, and I want you to decide in literally two minutes, what’s the damn thing that needs to be said in the room that’s not being said?
Brad Johnson: Interesting.
Keith Ferrazzi: And you come back and have a different conversation. Now, if I were to just ask a room of 12 people, what’s not being said that should be said? You’re going to hear crickets. But by going into breakout session or turning the person next to you and assigning them to come up with the answer, you change culture, practices change culture. The book has 37 little practices that I have statistically validate will make a difference in a team. And I just want leaders to be gobbling them up like popcorn. Similar to Never Eat Alone, people read Never Eat Alone, it was full of simple practices for networking, simple tips and tools, et cetera, for networking. We did the same thing with leadership.
Brad Johnson: Yeah, well, as I think about a framework in my head, Keith, it’s interesting because Do Business, Do Life, one of the litmus tests with how we build our community is would I invite them over to the family dinner table and surround my family with them, whether or not we were doing business or not. That’s a great litmus test of do I want this individual in my life and my family surrounded by them.
But as I think about Never Eat Alone and then Never Lead Alone, what comes to my mind is Never Eat Alone is almost like started out as this external networking, where Never Lead Alone is pointing the same principles internal at your team. And so, I would think to create that safe place where you can actually have real conversation. Not, oh, I can’t say the thing I’m actually thinking. Is it a similar concept, like breaking bread with your team? Is that one of the things that helps create some of that safetiness and like, we can actually get there and start to have the real conversation that’s not being had?
Keith Ferrazzi: Yeah. So, when I coach a team, we do a dinner in a day. And the dinner is the opportunity to share vulnerability. And I ask a very powerful question. What experience of your past do you think helps make up and define who you are today? Now, I look pretty hard charging tough leader. I have very high standards for myself and my team. And when I share with my team how that was born from scarcity and insecurity as a poor kid in Pittsburgh, whose dad was unemployed, steel industry crashed, all the dreams we had for me and my family were shaken, I had to hustle my ass to achieve early on. That still, it breeds in me a certain style of leadership.
Now, I’m constantly trying to evolve from that and to adopt new and different forms of celebratory leadership, appreciative leadership, et cetera, servant leadership. But I still sometimes fall back into all bad behaviors that were born in fear, scarcity, and insecurity. But it helps when the team understands the backstory. And knowing that I want to be a different and better leader at times, we also have those conversations very openly.
There’s another chapter talked about giving each other coaching peer to peer. So, that 3/3/3 exercise I talked to you about, we do something called an Open 360 in teams, an Open 360, where the team goes around and says to me, “Keith, in the last quarter, what I most appreciated about your leadership is X. Keith, going forward next quarter, I might suggest. Because I care about your success, Keith, I might suggest.” But we all do it for each other. Everybody gives it for everybody.
So, I get feedback from the team, but the team learns to give each other feedback, right? So, every chapter, that’s Chapter 10 and the chapter about growth and how teams coach each other, right, versus the chapter in candor and how do you improve candor and transparency and how do you create a challenge culture among the team? Each of those chapters have very specific practices, like I’m showing you.
Brad Johnson: Keith, how do you get your team comfortable with feedback? Because I’ve found all people naturally resisted, it’s easy to get defensive when you kind of have a blind spot identified by somebody else. Is that just part of your hiring process? Is it part of this ritual that you’re going through with the team? How do you get them there?
Keith Ferrazzi: Yeah. So, let me break it down to big three points. First of all, most feedback has come to us in our lives as a directive. My parents gave me feedback. They were not giving me input. They were giving me a directive, right? Sit up straight, don’t eat that way, et cetera. That’s how I learned how to give feedback to my employees. Teachers, coaches, bosses, they all gave you directives. Now, all of a sudden, I’m saying, you’re going to give each other coaching, you’re going to give each other feedback. Most people think it’s coming as a directive. We’ve got to stop that and we’ve got to say, when you’re giving feedback to peers, it’s input.
Brad, I’m not telling you what to do. I’m giving you my bold opinion. You take that data and do with what you want. That’s a powerful separation, both for me, because I’m not coming on the pressure saying, you got to do this, Brad, nor you feeling the pressure. You’re like thank you for the input. Yes, I will. No, I won’t. Maybe I will. Right? And so, what we’re trying to do is we’re trying to say to a team, we need to accelerate radical bold inputs, and then Brad gets to make a radical bold decision based on the inputs you serve. That make sense?
Brad Johnson: Yeah, where a directive would feel like, I don’t like directives, so I push back on directive.
Keith Ferrazzi: Yeah. All because I might disagree. You’re allowed to disagree. And if you get three directives and people give you different points of view, what the hell do you do then? But if you get three bold pieces of input, you’d be like, that’s interesting. I’m going to go triangulate that with other inputs.
Brad Johnson: This is Intel that I can learn and grow from.
Keith Ferrazzi: Exactly, exactly. That’s one piece. Second piece is you got to break feedback down into its components. There’s feedback and ideas and certain practices help you get better feedback on your ideas. There’s a chapter, and we’ll call around, how do you move report outs to stress testing? How do you collaborate differently? So, there’s that. Then there’s feedback on performance where you’re giving feedback on whether you’ve done well or not done well in someone’s perception. Then there’s feedback on skills and competencies. My marketing department needs to brush up and get better at AI, et cetera. Then there needs to be feedback on style. You break those things down, and each of those have different practices to deliver feedback. I don’t think we’ve been very clear when we say what feedback is.
Then the last piece is you just institute very simple practices. We instituted this Open 360 because instead of me saying, Brad, let me tell you what you did wrong with this past quarter. I’m saying, Brad, here’s what I appreciated this past quarter, but I might suggest in the next quarter, you consider this. So, now, you’re not defensive, defending yourself on something I’m accusing you of for the last quarter, right? You’re like, thank you for that input about what I should do going forward, but I don’t feel like I’ve got to defend myself or make you believe something different, right, about something from the past. So, we’ve really engineered the practices to be psychologically safe, and that’s very important in the work that we do.
Brad Johnson: Well, and I also like how you’ve paired it with some praise too. I mean, I find a lot in business. We have a saying at Triad, if you think it, say it. Obviously, when we’re talking about praise and another team member doing it well because that’s like the greatest gift you could give someone and you’re just holding it back and all it takes is about three minutes of intention. So, I like that you’ve worked that into that of like, hey, here’s something I noticed you do really well and here’s something that maybe focus on going forward that can make you even better. Who doesn’t want that in their leadership?
Keith Ferrazzi: Exactly. We believe that practices change culture. Practices change life. It’s process and practice. The whole book has 37 high return practices that we’ve researched and validated make a difference and people’s success in life.
Brad Johnson: You tease this a little bit and now I’m intrigued and I know we’ve just got a few minutes left here. AI, obviously, it’s all over the place. It’s massively impacting every business on the planet right now. One of the books I just got done reading, it said one of the biggest things holding organizations back is you haven’t actually let your team know it’s okay to use AI. They feel like the kid in class that’s cheating on the test. And obviously, I think the leaders that are looking forward understand this is massively going to impact everything we do. So, how have you infused the thought process around AI into leadership and all of the different things you’ve learned over the last 20-year journey in that?
Keith Ferrazzi: So, I’ve been studying AI for longer than the public has generally been aware of it. I’ve been in a board of advisors of a buddy of mine named Peter Diamandis, a great futurist technology. I’ve been working with Peter for years. He used to say, if your business isn’t an AI business, you’ll be out of business. And he said that six, seven years ago. And so, I’ve been aware of and focused on this for quite some time. And what I can tell you is that it is going to fundamentally transform our lives.
And the reality is it may make many financial advisors out of work. The amount of effective advice that you’re going to get from an AI is going to be so significant that it’s going to put the average financial advisor out of work. So, just recognize that to be true. Now, the question is, would you fight it? You can’t fight it. It’s like fighting a tsunami. This is coming period. Or do you become the best at it?
And what I would do if I were anybody in any role, financial advisor, whatever it is, I would be the person that asks the provocative question that’s not being asked yet, that’s in that dark area, like how will AI give better advice on portfolio management than I’m currently giving today? That’s a powerful question. I would go on a journey, curious journey to answer that question. I would be smarter than anybody else in answering that question. I would bring together the smartest minds. I would read the most important books and articles, and I’d start writing on the subject. I would reveal it before anybody else thinks about it. As a result of being curious and proactive, you’ll always be one step ahead of those losing their jobs, waiting for the tsunami to take over.
So, I want you to become a kite surfer of the tsunami. I want you to see that this is coming, but I want you to get ahead of it, I want you to get above it, I want you to be a leader in it. And if you’re not that, you’ll probably be swallowed by it and drowned. So, that’s your only option. Be out ahead or be underwater.
Brad Johnson: I believe that to be very sound advice. It’s interesting. I was an IT major in college before I got into finance, and now it’s all coming full circle. The human element, you talk a lot about.
Keith Ferrazzi: Now, let come back on that for a second.
Brad Johnson: Yeah.
Keith Ferrazzi: So, this is something you could do with the Triad group. So, I was speaking a few weeks ago at the CEO Magazine conference. So, CEO Magazine and they had a big conference for all their manufacturing CEOs. And I said to the room, “How many of you in here are using AI in any way at all?” Most of the people raised their needs. And I said, “How many of you think that you’re in the top percentile of those cracking the code of how the AI is changing the future of manufacturing?” And I would say 10% raise their hands.
And I said, “Of you who are 10%, would you be interested in meeting on a monthly basis and getting into small groups and coaching each other on what you’re doing and how you’re doing it, so that each of you–” there might have been 30 or 40 in the room that’s raised their hands. I said, “You’re all doing something exceptional. What if you all taught each other on how to be as exceptional as each of you and you radically raise the bar,” right? And I think like 15 of them said that they were in.
So, we started hosting these monthly meetings where 15 come to the table and they’re sharing best practices. And the guy who’s running CEO Magazine, he and I are documenting this stuff and writing about it for the magazine because we’re turning around and sharing it with others. But these are the role models. These are the black belts of AI, right?
And so, you should be doing that, Brad, for your financial advisors. You should be inviting people to co-create being black belts of AI. I wrote an article in Forbes Magazine about building black belts of AI that talk about this methodology, but in every segment, in every role, who are going to be the hosts of the black belts of AI. When I said earlier that you’ve got to go be ahead, you’ve got to go be a kite surfer of AI, I’m suggesting you can go pull the community together to learn from each other.
Brad Johnson: You are preaching to the choir, my man. Actually, this coming Monday, we have something called DBDL Academy, which is for our full community, both founders and teams. And we are actually doing a breakout where we have five different community members doing exactly that in five different areas of business. But as I listen to you, I’m like, we got to take that and put that on steroids, though, because it’s changing and evolving daily. It’s wild.
Keith Ferrazzi: You can be the leading support group for the future of AI in financial services. And that’s what, by the way, I understand you had my business partner wrote in. And we created this Beyond Connections community of individuals who really want to take everything that I’ve written about for 24 years and put it into action. And over an eight-week period, we are helping to elevate people’s relationships, people’s leadership, people’s peer-to-peer communities, helping them understand how to be out ahead of these trends, right? Not being swallowed up from them.
And it really is the same thing that I’m teaching folks to do, we’re doing ourselves. We’re building that community. It’s been very inspiring, right? Very inspiring to see a group raise their hands and say, like, I’m in and I want to be out ahead of others. And that’s the kind of, like, you mentioned, it’s the kind of people that you want to be hanging out with. I was just going to say, anybody interested in that, the group is, you go to ConnectedSuccess.com and get involved with this. We’d love to have you.
Brad Johnson: I love that, Keith. What’s wild, I look back at your early work, Never Eat Alone is all about human connection and relationships. And now, we’re talking about AI. I was just talking with our CTO, Quin, the other day and he was talking about when he first got into finance, he was having to build data stacks of like, here’s all these databases and categorizing information. Here are my wine lovers, here are my people that would join a prayer group in the mornings. The truth is AI can take all that data and you could have a list of your wine lovers in three seconds.
And so, now, you take that human connection element with AI powering it. And it actually exponentially creates all these other opportunities that we never even dreamed of. So, how is that for you seeing your work about relationships come full circle, run it through this technology lens, and just open up all of these other opportunities that you probably never even dreamed of?
Keith Ferrazzi: I have dreamed of them because I’ve always had at least three or four or five administrative assistants working on my business. And they are people who are curating all of that, those networks and the data and the names, et cetera. Now, those individuals have tools to use. They just allow us to do 10x what we used to do, 100x what we used to do. And so, I’ve always believed in agents. I’ve hired humans to be agents. Now, I can hire humans and technology to be agents.
So, living an agentic life is, I think I’ve always done that because I’ve also wanted to spend sufficient time with my loved ones, my kids. I’ve wanted to enjoy the philanthropy that I do. I like interesting people. I like writing and sharing my insights. So, if I had to do all of the work myself, I wouldn’t have time to live a very blended life like that, a big life. And so, I’ve always leveraged agents. They happen to be human in the past. Now, my partners are going to be a combination of human and AI.
Brad Johnson: Well, as we wrap here, I love that, and my head’s swimming a little bit right now because I think about the work you’ve done in relationships and AI, and now, how Triad, we’re going through the same thing you’re going through in your business right now. How do we evolve as quickly as all of this is evolving, which sometimes feels tough to keep up? But back to kind of the heart of this show, Do Business, Do Life, the way we see it, it’s the integration. It’s building a business that blesses your life, that doesn’t become your life. Obviously, your work is all over that. So, I would be thrilled to just hear what is your definition of what that means to you as you look into the future.
Keith Ferrazzi: Well, I got married recently. So, doing business and doing life does take a little bit of a twist. I don’t believe in trying to do balance in your life. Like, how much time do I spend in work? How much time do I spend in personal? I’ve always lived a blended life. And to me, co-creating my future with my family is what really matters to me. And to me, I love that. I mean, I love living a blended life. I love that you mentioned bringing clients over to the home, bringing my kids on business retreats that I’m doing, et cetera. So, to me, it’s just about continuing to have a very long, we could have an entire conversation about longevity. I believe very strongly in living to 120 and thriving. So, how am I planning for that and how am I planning it with the kind of people that I can co-elevate with for the rest of my life? That’s the key.
Brad Johnson: I love that. Well, back to AI, it’s going to impact everything including longevity and health, and so, let’s plan for a longer future, which is a beautiful outcome of everything that’s happening. So, Keith, I want to say thank you. Love to connect here virtually. Hopefully, we get to do it in person someday. And just thanks for sharing with the audience and the community here. This was awesome stuff. Really enjoyed every minute.
Keith Ferrazzi: My pleasure, Brad. I really enjoyed it as well. Thank you.
Brad Johnson: All right. Till next time. We’ll see you.
