Inner MBA

“Self-Management and the Healthy Executive Mind”

Jeremy Hunter

JEREMY HUNTER: Hi, welcome. We're at the beginning of a big adventure. And I'd
like to welcome you to the Inner MBA program. And we have a nine-month journey that's
waiting for you. And I'm very excited about it. And I hope you're excited about it as well. We've
got some really great things planned for you. It's an education that I'm actually quite envious of.
And I wish that I had when I was maybe just starting out.
So let's pause for a minute. And before we jump into all this, I'd like to ask you some
questions. Why are you here? Why are you here? And what do you want from this experience?
Even if you want to take a minute to just make some notes, what brings you here? And
what are the questions you'd like answered as we move through this? And what's motivating you
to give your time and energy to this process?
I'm sure you're very busy. And you've got a lot of things going on. Like, why are you
here?
So if you take a minute, just even pause the video. And write down some questions. What
do you want? What do you want from this? All right, write down what comes to mind. And then
as we go through, refer back to those questions. And are you getting them answered? And at the
end of this process, what results would you like to be different?
So I teach at the Drucker School of Management. And I'm sure that you know that Peter
Drucker was considered to be the founding father of the discipline of management. And he had
this notion that leadership was defined by our results. And after all, at the end of the day,
something has to be accomplished. The house has to get built. The product has to get shipped.
The software has to work. The virus has to be managed.

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 So what are the results that we are being measured by? And I don't mean just quarterly
results. But what are the results you have in your life that you'd like to be different? What are the
results that you have right now that you're proud of and that are working well?
And so results could be something like the quality of your relationships-- quality of
relationships with the people around you, the people you live with, the people you work with.
Maybe the quality of sleep. Or even, how well do you-- do you enjoy yourself every day?
Is work an enjoyable thing for you? And so where are-- what are the results that you're
being measured by? What are the results that you measure yourself by? And what works and
what doesn't work for you right now?
So if leadership is defined by results, Drucker also had this idea that you can't manage
other people unless you manage yourself first, which seems to be a foregone conclusion. But
when I started teaching this nearly 20 years ago, my colleagues looked around at each other and
said, well, we don't teach personal finance.
Why would we teach you how to manage yourself? And then 2008 happened. And
everybody freaked out. And nobody ever asked me that question again. So here we are nearly a
decade later with another collective crisis. And how are you managing yourself?
So to be clear, this isn't about managing the boss that makes you crazy, or your team that
you think is not so competent, or the difficult person you live with. We're not dealing with those
people out there. We're really dealing with you.
And so be clear that the one thing that you can control is your own response to things and
your own mindset and then the actions that you take from there. So how do we do that? So if
leadership is measured by results, and you can't manage yourself-- you can't manage other people
unless you manage yourself first-- then I imagine there's like this figure eight, that we have two
games to play. One is the game outside, the game that's probably your job, or your set of
responsibilities, or the relationships you're involved in-- all the forces outside yourself.
And on the other side of the figure eight is the inner game, which is what this program is
all about. What's going on inside you? What are your-- what's your mindset? What are the
emotional reactions you're having?
What are the assumptions and expectations and judgments and rationalization and
justifications you bring into a room? What's your body telling you? What's the quality of how
you feel from any given moment?

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 So you've got an outer game and you've got an inner game. And that ideally, when you
play both of these games well, you're able to monitor those things in real time. So let me give
you an example of a client I work with, who works in financial services. She's a partner. She's a
very well respected. And she is in a meeting with a very important client for her firm--
multimillion dollar client. Somebody in that meeting says something inflammatory. A wave of
anger rolls through the room, including through my client. And she looks over at her client and
notices that he's gathering his papers to leave. And if he walks out that door, her career is going
with him. It's over.
So she did what she was trained to do, which was to first manage what was going on
inside her. And she put her hand on the tabletop, which gave her attention somewhere to go and
not get taken away by the anger that everyone else was experiencing. And then once that anger
inside her subsided, she turned her attention outside into the room, acknowledged what was
going on and what everyone was feeling. And then really deftly redirected everyone's attention
into a more positive direction. She glances over at her client. His papers are now back on the
table. The day was saved.
And so to me, that is the archetypal example of what happens when you learn to play
both of these games well. When we only play the outer game well and we don't have any kind of
reference to what's going on inside, what's going on inside can hijack us and take us to places we
don't necessarily go or want to go. And when we only pay attention to the inner game, sometimes
that's not connected to outward action.
And so we need to be able to do both. And ideally, we need to be able to do both in real
time. So for me, I had to learn how to do this in real time, big time, actually.
Nearly 30 years ago, when I was 20, I was diagnosed with an incurable, terminal illness
and told that I had about five years to live-- 90 percent chance of dying within five years was the
prognosis. And I thought well, 90 percent is good news because somebody has got to be in the 10
percent.
I remember walking out of the hospital and telling my father. I said, "You know, Dad,
this is good news because I'm going to be in the 10 percent that lives." And so I thought very
naively that if somehow I meditated and somehow transformed what was going on inside me,
that maybe a miracle would happen and I would live. And strangely enough, I meditated and a
miracle happened. And I lived.

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 But in any case, that's getting ahead of the story. I was just finishing my second year of
college and I went back to school.
I was an East Asian studies major. My mother's Japanese. And I spent a lot of time
between these two cultures.
And I went and talked with my professor, who was a professor of Japanese religion,
Eugene Swanger, who is still alive in his 80s. And we're still friends 30 years later. But in any
case, he reaches into his desk.
And he pulls out a book. He pulls out this book actually, The Three Pillars of Zen by
Philip Kapleau. And this book was the first book in English to teach Westerners how to do Zen.
And I like to say that it's really important to know that in Japan, Zen didn't come from California.
It was the warriors' practice. And it gave you skill to look through, to see through fear
and anger and rage and to be able to be calm in the face of your own mortality. And that's why
these warriors, I think, were so attracted to it.
So I went on this journey with this book. And it was-- it was a light, really, that shined
my way through understanding how to manage all this stuff that was going on inside me. And
that was the beginning of a journey very similar to the one that you're going to go on, except
mine was much less efficient.
I traveled around the world learning different practices, learning different things I could
do with my mind and body to transform it. And I ended up, as I said, living another 17 years. But
in any case, I think without that internal grounding, being 20 years old and facing your mortality,
but then also facing the need to make a life, and the need to make good decisions, the need to
invest attention in something that's going to be growth oriented and generative while also living
day-to-day with extraordinary uncertainty, and not knowing: was today the day that it was all
going to be over? Because that was a real possibility. And so I got advanced graduate training in
how to deal with uncertainty. And that's part of what I want to share with you today.
So the question is, really, who do you want to be? And what's your intention for your
own life? And if you want to maybe even pause here for a second, and just think about, as we've
gone through this situation, who do you want to be? Have you been the person you wanted to be
thus far? And what would you like to be different?

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 What's that image of yourself that you would like to cultivate? One of my very first
clients was an entrepreneur, a genius businessman. His name's Mike [INAUDIBLE]. And he
dealt with-- he was very successful.
He was in real estate and very successful in in his late 20s. Made hundreds of millions of
dollars. And unfortunately came from a family of alcoholics, and came face-to-face with the fact
that all of this success he was having was not serving him well and nearly killed himself through
alcohol. And in his own recovery process, he developed this practice, really, of imagining him
living an ideal day in his perfect life.
And it wasn't about what car was in the garage, or how big his house was, or how much
money was in the bank account. It was an ideal life organized around what he was feeling. He
woke up and he felt safe in his own home.
And he felt loved because next to him was a person who was-- who appreciated him and
loved him unconditionally. And then he went to the office where he felt a great sense of
challenge and camaraderie and teamwork in this organization that he had built. And the vision
went through this ideal day in his perfect life. And it ended with him going to sleep, feeling like
he had used his energy and resources in ways that served him and his team and family and
community well.
And he told me, he said, "Whenever I'm encountering a situation where I don't know
what to do, I ask the guy living my ideal life." And he said, "What I'm always freaked out by is
he always has an answer." He always has an answer.
And I just do what he tells me. And he said, "I thought it would take me-- I was in my
late 20s, early 30s when I was going through this. And I thought it would take me 20 years to
realize this vision I had in my life." And he said, "Seven years later, I woke up feeling safe next
to a woman who loved me and who I loved, working in an organization that was incredibly
successful that had tremendous camaraderie."
And he said, "Wow, I did it. I didn't realize I did it. But I did it."
And so for you, that's the goal I have for you, so that you can manifest that in your own
life. But first, you have to be clear about: What do you want to be? Who do you want to be?
What vision do you have of yourself and your life, for your family, your company, and all of
that?

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 Because what's important is that to understand that you're contagious. No pun intended in
this particular moment in history. But who you are, what you're doing is broadcasting itself into
your network.
Your emotional reactions, your attitudes, your feelings are being read by the people
around you. And if you're the leader, then you're even more contagious. And I'd like to say that
an organization experiences the consciousness of its leader. And so how aware are you?
How deliberate are you about what you're saying, what you're doing? And so when I said
earlier, this isn't about how do I fix my team? How do I change the person I live with? How do I
deal with my crazy boss? It's really about you.
So then we asked the question in the beginning, like why do you do any of this stuff
anyway? Why I do this Inner MBA. Why is this necessary?
And I think there are three reasons. One of the reasons is the condition of the world. And
the second reason is the condition of work. And then the third reason is the condition of humans
themselves.
And so let's just take a look at the world. We live in a world of VUCA, which is a term
you probably have now become very familiar with. It was designed, or defined by the Army War
College at the end of the Cold War when they realized that Communism versus Capitalism was
not going to be the reigning model for describing the world going forward. And they developed
VUCA as a result. And so what's VUCA? VUCA is volatility, uncertainty, complexity,
ambiguity.
So about until March of 2020, this was an abstract conversation. But now it's not. Now
it's not.
Now this is-- we are undoubtedly living in a VUCA world. And it adapts-- and it
demands that we be adaptive. And so again, let's take stock. Maybe put this on pause for a
minute.
But how has VUCA affected you? How has it affected you personally? How has it
affected you emotionally?
How has it affected you in terms of your vision for your life? So if you think about
yourself and then let's just expand a circle outward, how has it affected your family? How has it
affected your organization? And how has it affected the community you're involved in?

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 How has it affected your world? And so take a minute, just write it all down. Maybe this
is the first time you've taken stock of this whole process. And when you're ready, you can come
back.
So there is a second set of conditions, which is the conditions of work. And have you
noticed that the world of work has changed dramatically in the last 30 years? Because I think that
a lot of people actually haven't noticed that the world of work has changed a lot because we
haven't really adapted to it very well.
And Drucker talked about the notion that knowledge worker productivity-- knowledge
workers are people probably like you and me that use our minds to make a living. Making people
productive that use their minds for a living is one of the greatest of the 21st century management
challenges. And in the developed, the so-called developed world, it's the survival requirement.
How do you help people who use their minds to make a living more productive? Now,
truth be told, I don't think anybody wakes up in the morning asking themselves, how do I be
more productive today? I think they ask themselves, how do I live a life of impact?
How do I get a good night's sleep? How do I have harmonious relationships with the
people that are important to me? And interestingly, those will play a role in this great drama of
how it is that we be productive.
But one thing that's important to know is that there's a-- I think our ingrained cultural
habits around productivity are really defined a lot by the era of industrial work, and that there is a
dramatic difference in what makes people working in a traditional factory setting versus a
productive-- what makes a person like that productive versus somebody who is at a computer
keyboard all day? They're two very different kinds of productivity.
And I know because I worked at a metal plating factory going through college. And I
electroplated door hinges and stamped out parts and things like that. And I think that implicitly,
we still see work defined in this way.
And what are the qualities of this kind of work? The job is clearly defined.
I knew exactly what I had to do. I had to electroplate a barrel full of door hinges before
my shift was ended. I could focus attention. That was the only thing I had to do. Nobody
bothered me.
Evaluation was concretely measured. At the end of the day, I could count how many door
hinges I had electroplated. It was largely solitary. Nobody bothered me.

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 There were clear time space boundaries. At 3:30, I went home. And unless I had post-
traumatic dreams about being chased by a gigantic door hinges, I didn't think about work. And
work on the weekend was not something that happened.
And the signature emotion, I think, of that whole experience was boredom. And so the
challenge I had was how could I make it interesting for myself? How could I manage this
experience to make it interesting?
But if we shift to knowledge work, the primary asset of knowledge work isn't the
machine with the big electroplating liquids and all of that. But it's what's inside your head. We're
using our minds to make a living.
It's what's inside your head. And how do you relate to the other people that you have to
collaborate with? I think that there are very few people that aren't working on teams. So it's both
the knowledge inside your head and then how you're able to capitalize on that knowledge
together. So quality of relationship becomes essential in this process.
So if we think about knowledge work, the tasks aren't clear. Or they change from day to
day. You're interrupted all the time. It's hard to focus.
Evaluation is not clear, often. Work is intensely relational. In a flattened hierarchy, how
do you-- where does the authority come from? And how do you convince somebody who is
already investing their energy to give you a little bit of their energy to help you? And that
time/space boundaries are weak. I don't know anybody that goes home at 3:30 and not think
about work or not devote at least a part of their weekend to work.
I mean, you can even go on vacation and still be followed by work.
And the signature emotion isn't boredom, but rather anxiety. And so what that means for
being productive is hidden in plain sight. The stress is unrelenting.
It's hard to concentrate. We have this workplace of incredible emotional complexity
today. One ill-thought-out tweet can ruin someone's career.
There's no structured downtime. And that quality of relationship is essential.
And until COVID came along, I called this the new normal. But this is now the old new
normal.
We have a new new normal. And the whole COVID crisis has amplified all of these
qualities. In some cases, there's absolutely no boundary between home and work, or when is
there structured downtime?

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 Or you've got to be able to read a team that you're not physically connected to. So what's
going on with that? And how do you focus attention? And how do you manage stress in all of
this?
And so I think March, April, May, responding to the coronavirus was really a sprint for a
lot of people. But you can only sprint so long. And so really now it's a marathon. And how do
you keep up your stamina and energy in this situation for a circumstance that may be a year, a
year and a half, two years out until we really come to terms with it.
OK, so relationship, the quality of your mind, and then the quality of your relationship
really is what is at question here and what is our focal point here. And then of course, a lot of
people deride these things as the so-called soft skills. But if we're really honest with ourselves,
there's nothing harder than dealing with yourself and other people.
So how do you make a team effective? You probably know Google did the study of
looking at what were the five keys to making teams effective. And here they are.
So psychological safety. Can you take risks on the team without feeling insecure,
embarrassed?
Dependability. Can you count on each other to do high quality work on time?
Structure and clarity. Are the goals understood, roles understood, execution plans
understood?
Is work meaningful?
Is this something that's personally important to you?
And then, what's the impact of the work? Do we feel like it really matters in the world?
Which of these five things, psychological safety, dependability, structure and clarity,
meaning of work, impact of the work do you think is most important? Interestingly enough, it's
psychological safety, by far was the most important factor. And for reasons that we'll talk about
later.
But if-- and this is why-- but if somebody doesn't feel safe, then they're not going to share
their knowledge with you. They're not going to-- the relationship isn't going to be as smooth or
honest or transparent if somebody doesn't feel like they can voice their opinion without being
attacked or teased or derided in some way. And so this is why understanding what are you
putting in your network?

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 What are your reactions? What's your own internal state like? Having a finger on that
pulse becomes even more important.
And the reason why was because the teams that were deemed psychologically safe were
far more effective.
They brought in more revenue. They were less likely to leave the firm. They were better
at harnessing diverse ideas, so they're more creative. And they were rated effective two times
more by the execs that they reported to.
So at the end of the day, what this means is, is are people's nervous systems not on
defense mode? Do I feel like I have a place here? All right, and so here's some of the statements
that are measures of psychological safety.
Do you agree or disagree with these things?
If I make a mistake, it's held against me.
Am I able to bring up problems and tough issues without recrimination?
Do people on the team reject others for being different? I had a student that worked for a
large Japanese automobile manufacturing company. And when he went back to Japan, people
teased him about the color of his socks.
OK, do I really want to contribute because I'm getting teased for something stupid like
this?
So is it safe to take a risk?
Is it difficult to ask for help?
Would anybody on this team deliberately act in a way to undermine someone else on the
team?
And then are my unique skills and talents valued and utilized on this team?
So to the extent of how you measure up to these seven statements is a good gauge of
whether or not your people feel safe or not.
So the third thing, the human condition, the conditions of the world, conditions of work,
what about conditions of just us humans? I like to think about these are the things that we were
never taught in school. And but they are instrumental in helping us be effective.
So one is that your survival system overrides your capacity to be rational or to relate to
others-- again going back to psychological safety, and being aware of what are you putting in
your environment. So if you don't feel safe, the defense systems go on. I'm not contributing.

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 Or the relationship is getting undermined.
The other thing, this comes from the work of Tristan Harris that the attention economy is
not really the attention economy. It's really a distraction economy. And so if the quality of our
minds is what generates value, our capacity to focus attention, we're also living at a time when
any number of forces are arrayed against actually being able to focus attention.
And so distraction is big business. And so your capacity to manage attention is probably
not something you were taught in school.
Now this is interestingly where Japan is very different.
In that culture, traditionally, education started with being able to focus your attention. So
you as a child probably learned calligraphy or swordplay or flower arrangement or a tea
ceremony as a way of cultivating your capacity to focus. And a generation ago, you weren't
considered a mature human being until you had one of those skills under your belt.
But in the brave new world of knowledge work, attention is being frayed. And one price
we paid for that is that it's easy to feel overloaded by the amount of information coming at us.
And building on what we talked about earlier in terms of emotional reactions and safety, that the
more information coming at us also degrades our capacity to resist our emotional impulses. So
we may act out on an emotional reaction that's not in our best interest or not in the team's best
interest, or not in your marriage's best interest.
So that's another element. So our survival system overrides our capacity to relate and be
rational. Our attention is getting distracted.
We get overwhelmed from all of this stuff around us that causes us to be more impulsive.
And the last one is that we're mostly mindless. Nobody ever teaches you that.
But it's absolutely true that the vast majority of how we function is mindless. And we'll
talk about this more later. But some people say 90 percent of the time, you're operating on
automatic pilot.
My wife routinely sends me photos of my keys hanging out of the front door with the
label: Mr. Mindfulness strikes again.
So if that's the case, we're operating on automatic pilot. And we don't know at any given
moment what we're feeling or what assumptions we're bringing into the meeting, or simply how's
your body feeling right now.

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 And then if you're in pain, for example, how is that affecting your capacity to see
choices? Or if you're angry, how is that affecting your capacity to see choices? And then how
does that influence the action you take and then the result you get?
So again, leadership is defined by results. And yet, if we're flying blind a lot of the time
because of mindless habit, not really seeing what we're doing or why we're doing it, how do we
expect to be effective, let alone happy or healthy? So I like to ask the people I work with: How
are you affecting the invisible office?
Now, the visible office is the office that we all see. It's the computers. It's the desk. It's
the watercooler.
But then there's the invisible office. And the invisible office are the unspoken agreements
we have, or the unspoken beliefs I have about someone on my team or my boss or something like
that. It's the reticence I have to bring up a difficult topic.
The invisible office is really what's affecting everything. It's our attitudes. It's our
feelings. It's the unspoken assumptions.
And so we may be good at the outer game, for example. But we can be really lousy at the
inner game because we don't necessarily know how to manage the invisible office. So my
favorite example of this is a former student of mine who was a scientist at NASA.
And his job was to calculate the navigational pathway of space probes through the solar
system. So it was his team that put a space probe on Mars, but also Pluto, sorry. So to put a space
probe on Pluto is like me standing outside my house in Los Angeles and throwing a dime across
the country and getting it into a window in Rockefeller plaza in Manhattan.
That's basically what they're doing. And he's a genius. And he can do that.
In fact, he's been very successful at doing that. But when it comes to having a difficult
conversation with somebody on his team, he would rather go through the entire bureaucratic
rigmarole of reorganizing the team so that this fellow he had to have a difficult conversation with
was on someone else's team in order to avoid having go through the emotional complexity of
this. And so I thought, well, that's very interesting.
You can put a space probe on Pluto, but managing your own anxiety or anger was
something that was really difficult for him. And I thought well, you're the representation of
Western society-- that we're so good at managing all this outer stuff. But managing the things
that are closest to us seem to be an impossibility.

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 And I set up a scenario with him doing a role-play. And I was going to be the person he
had to have the difficult conversation with. And I set two chairs facing each other. And let's call
him Bob.
I said, "OK, Bob, sit down and make yourself comfortable." And the first thing that Bob
did was take his chair. And he pulled it all the way across the room until he was like six or seven
meters across the room.
And then he sat down. And we're like really far apart. And he said, "OK, I'm ready to
have the conversation."
And I looked, and I said, "Do you notice that we're far apart?" And he hadn't-- he looked
around and he goes "Oh, I guess we are." And I said, "So what are you feeling in your body right
now?"
And he was quiet for a minute. And that's when it hit him. He said, "I want to run the hell
out of this room."
And that's when he finally saw what was going on in his body and how is that affecting
his ability to interact with somebody. He wanted to leave the room. If he could, if the door was
open, I'm sure he would have pulled the chair out of the hallway and down the hall.
But what was happening inside him was largely invisible to him until he started to pay
attention. And that's what we're going to do. That's what we're going to do.
Again, like what are you putting into your network? And eventually, he had that difficult
conversation. And he worked it out.
He's quite a remarkable person. And I wish I could tell you his name. But he's one of the
people that I really enjoyed working with over the course of my career.
So again, like why do this stuff? There's three reasons. The conditions of work,
conditions of the world, and the human condition. And as the world VUCA-fies, because I don't
think VUCA is going to go away anytime soon, is your capacity to meet these challenges
becoming more sophisticated?
Just like my student had become more sophisticated about his own emotions to have a
difficult conversation with somebody on his team, is your ability to deal with these situations
becoming more sophisticated? Or is your default reaction just running faster, trying to get more
stuff done? So I tend to think that we have this mental model in our head that if I just make more
effort, if I just keep running faster, stay up later, wake up earlier, I'm going to get it all done.

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 But at some point, your biology starts to wear out. Excuse me. Your biology starts to
wear out. And these reactions that are designed to give us energy start undermining our own
capacity to be effective.
And they undermine our health. They undermine our mental health. We sink into states of
depression or burnout.
And then a few years ago, two researchers named something called Leadership
Lockdown Syndrome, which is what happens when your nervous system is on high alert so much
that you can no longer process information effectively. And that impacts your ability to think,
your memory, your capacity to make decisions, your judgment. You become more rigid.
You become more emotionally reactive. They're all things we heard earlier. And so again,
going back to the questions I asked you about, where are you now? And where do you want to
be?
Who are you now? And who do you want to be? Does any of this ring a bell or sound,
like, uncomfortably too familiar?
So then the question is: How do we start to bring this into your life? And as part of the
faculty, this is my job. And with the others you're going to have the great privilege of working
with.
And so how do we move from blind action-- not really being able to see our own gauges
on our dashboard-- to be able to read them to figure out how they're influencing the choices we're
making or the choices we perceive that we have, or the actions we take, and then eventually the
result we get-- to acting in a way that's clearer and more intentional and wiser, even, or maybe
even more compassionate caring or, dare I say, loving? And so I don't have answers for you. But
I have a lot of questions.
And some of the questions I'm going to ask over the course of the nine months of
working together, like what's happening in your body right now? Just like I asked Bob. What's
happening in your body right now?
And what are the emotions you're experiencing? And then what are the stories you're
telling yourself? You have a difficult meeting in a half an hour. What are the stories you're
telling yourself about this meeting?

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 And how is that influencing the choices you perceive you have? And if you were able to
let go of those stories, would some other better choices open up? Because those choices inform
action that get you the result.
And again, leadership is defined by our result. So at the Drucker School, we have a
question that we ask people. It's not "Did you enjoy the program?" or "Did you enjoy the class?"
But rather, "What are you going to do differently tomorrow morning?"
In fact, we call it the Monday Morning Difference. What are you going to do differently
on Monday morning? And so that's my question for you.
When Monday morning comes, what are you going to do differently? And what I hope
you do is enjoy the adventure that we have planned for you. It's going to be quite a ride. And I'll
be here. And you're going to meet a fascinating cast of characters. And I really wish you well. So
good luck. Thanks a lot. Take care.

Hunter Inner MBA