82 — Leading with Curiosity: Rick Kendall's Blueprint for Modern Management

Lenny: 00:00:00

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Hello, everybody. It’s Lenny Murphy with another edition of the Greenbook Podcast. Thank you so much for taking time out of your day to share it with us. And as usual—I’m like a broken record with this line, but I just think it’s funny—by ‘us,’ it’s not my other selves; we do have a guest. And somebody that is really a legend in—

Rick: 00:00:57

[laugh] .

Lenny: 00:00:58

Yeah, he snickers, but he is—Rick Kendall. Full transparency, Rick is a member of our Board of Directors. That’s not why he’s here, but he is somebody that I’ve had a chance to get to know over the years and just an amazingly brilliant guy. And not doing that because on the board of directors; it’s always been my opinion, Rick. And now you’re going to find out why I think that, too. So Rick, welcome.

Rick: 00:01:23

Thank you. Oh, that’s quite a build-up, Lenny. I don’t know if I can live up to that.

Lenny: 00:01:28

Uh, you know, it’s always it’s one of my gifts to be enthusiastic—

Rick: 00:01:34

[laugh] .

Lenny: 00:01:34

—right? So, [laugh] but I have no doubt. But now, give everybody a sense of why I consider you a legend and talk about your experience, and we’ll segue into the current topic.

Rick: 00:01:48

Well, I’m beginning to think that just being old makes you legendary. I don’t know. I [laugh] I started out in this business—I was thinking about this when I was kind of getting ready for this—that I probably started in this business long before most of the people listening to this podcast were born, I hate to say. I actually got into marketing research when I started my doctoral program at NYU, and I was assigned to be the research assistant to a guy named Daniel Yankelovich, who your older listeners probably know that name. And that was really my introduction to market research.

Initially, we worked on a separate project, but that didn’t come to fruition and I ended up doing part-time, and then later when I finished my degree, full-time work with Dan. But after I got my degree, you know, I’m a new PhD in social psych, and I said, “You know, I’d really like to do some more socially relevant research.” And his company did, you know, consumer product research primarily. And he said, “Well, I’m on the board of directors of a company up in Massachusetts named Abt Associates, and if you want, I’ll send a—I’ll write to Clark Abt and see if he might be interested in having you join his company.” And I did. He was and I did.

And so, we moved up to Cambridge. And I was assigned to work as a survey analyst in their—what they call their survey research group, which essentially was the in-house survey operations division. And Abt did—really they said 95%, but I think it was closer to 99% of their work for the federal government. So, the projects were enormous, they lasted for years. I don’t think I ever actually met a government client.

I mean, my clients internally were the internal research groups that were doing the work for the government. So, that was kind of different. After a while, what happened was, the guy who ran that department left the company and suddenly overnight, I found myself going from having no direct reports to having a staff of over 100. And that event has influenced, let me say, our podcast Management Mastery, in that suddenly I went from being not a manager to being a manager and was acutely aware of everything that went along with that. And I ran that department for a while, and then Clark wanted to get more into private sector research, so he said because I was the only one in the company who had ever done anything like that working for Danny Yankelovich, he assigned me to head up that operation.

And we luckily landed a contract with the major cable operator at the time. And that got me sort of into the cable arena. And through that connection, I connected to the head of research for Home Box Office. And we ended up doing a couple of projects for them, which he liked. And he said, “Why don’t you come and run our market research department?”

I had to do some hard talking to convince my wife. She wanted— [laugh] —uproot me, and we now had two children and moved back to the New York area. But we did. So, I ran the market research department at Home Box Office for about half my tenure, about ten years. And then in the middle of that, there was a lot of reorganization and I moved over to the marketing side and was director and then ultimately, vice president and brand manager for Cinemax—or Skinemax or Cinema X, or—heard them all. My kids used to say their father sold sex and violence on television with junk—

Lenny: 00:06:01

[laugh] .

Rick: 00:06:02

—using junk mail. So, you know, when I was thinking about it, this—I’ve actually seen market research from all three sides of the desk. And by that I mean, you know, I was a provider of research services, I was a seller of research services, and I was a consumer of research services. Because once I went into marketing, I was, you know, using the services. When I ran the research department, I was besieged by, you know, suppliers wanting to sell me research.

So, I’m sort of seeing the business from all the different angles. And as you said, right now, I’m retired pretty much and stay kind of active by being on the board of Greenbook. So, that’s kind of how I got where I am, how I became a legend in my own mind.

Lenny: 00:06:58

[laugh] .

Rick: 00:06:58

Or your mind.

Lenny: 00:07:00

Yeah, well, you know, we all know how—what my mind is like. Although, as you, [laugh] as you talk about Cinemax, I do remember vividly being a teenager, and, you know, sneaking in to turn on Cinemax late at night. So [laugh] .

Rick: 00:07:14

The internet before there was the internet. Yep.

Lenny: 00:07:18

It was [laugh] . My parents will see what I’m watching. Yeah.

Rick: 00:07:23

It all seems rather tame now, doesn’t it?

Lenny: 00:07:26

It does. It certainly does. Anyway, all right. We’ll move on from that. But you say that you retired. But yeah, you have a podcast, kind of taking all that experience. Management Mastery is the name of the podcast. And tell us a bit about that.

Rick: 00:07:43

Yeah. I started it with this friend of mine who I actually met when I was moving from one side of the business to the other at HBO. He’s an executive coach and has been for a number of years. I like to say he’s a real executive coach; he’s just not an out-of-work consultant. But he coaches senior executives in name-brand companies in New York.

I like to say his clients are the Fortune 1 companies, in that he actually coaches executives at Time Inc. Among many others. But that’s how I know Fred; that’s his background. My background, as I said, has been management, pretty much for a number of years. And we decided—we’ve done a couple of things: we have a course online for young professionals, and then we decided, you know, we did a little market research; there’s not a lot of information for people who have just become managers.

And one of the things that Fred knew from his experience—and anybody who’s following business at all—knows that companies are flattening down their structure. So, you know, where it used to be when I was growing up professionally other—although my experience was quite different, from what I said earlier, but you would get one or two people to manage and then they’d promote you and you’d have a staff of four or five, and then you would—so you would grow up in terms of the number of people you supervised, and you’d learn by your own mistakes when they really weren’t that serious. And we felt that, you know, now you can go from not managing anybody to managing a number of people and not have that background. So, what we’ve tried to do is talk about those kinds of things that a new manager will experience, so to prep them for, okay, how do I deal with that?

So, you know, things like, one of the things that struck me when I first got promoted at Abt was suddenly and literally overnight, I was different. My coworkers were now my direct reports, they treated me different, my boss now treated me different, the expectations were different, the demands were different. So, everything overnight changed. Even my personal life was different. I mean, suddenly, you’ve got a level of responsibility outside of your house that you didn’t have before.

So, that’s one kind of thing that we talk about: you got to be ready for that; it’s going to happen. And I’ll never [laugh] I’ll never forget, I was sitting at my desk one day after I’d been promoted for a while, and back in those days, you had a secretary sitting outside your office door. And one of my direct reports who had just recently been a colleague walks in, couldn’t see me sitting in my office and says to my secretary, “What sort of mood is he in?” [laugh] . I was like, “What sort of mood is he in?”

So, I mean, suddenly, you become this different person. So, that’s one thing that we try to deal with. And then we, you know, have episodes on the three main mistakes that a new manager can make. You know, like, I don’t know, that they suddenly think that they have to have all the answers, that they can’t ask for advice. You know, things like that. So, we try to cover those very common misconceptions that a new manager has. That’s basically what we address. We try to look at the different aspects of management from the perspective of somebody who’s—we say young professionals, but you know, they don’t have to be young. Some, I think there’s information that can be valuable for any manager at any level.

Lenny: 00:11:38

Now so, if I’m hearing you correctly, my guess is it’s not so much a condensed MBA course—

Rick: 00:11:44

[laugh] .

Lenny: 00:11:44

—right, [except outside] . The stuff they don’t tell you—

Rick: 00:11:47

Right.

Lenny: 00:11:47

In MBA school.

Rick: 00:11:48

Right.

Lenny: 00:11:49

The soft skills? The—

Rick: 00:11:50

We do not talk about finance. I’ll put it that way [laugh] .

Lenny: 00:11:53

Okay.

Rick: 00:11:54

That’s—

Lenny: 00:11:54

All right.

Rick: 00:11:55

Yes.

Lenny: 00:11:56

So now, have you found that things have changed? I mean, you’re a researcher at heart. So, I know that you’ve backed some of this up with research. Are there soft skills that maybe hav—would have taught ten years ago, that now are de-emphasized and new things that you’re emphasizing that didn’t necessarily seem that important a while back?

Rick: 00:12:19

That’s a good question. I don’t know.

Lenny: 00:12:23

Hence, one of your lessons: I don’t know.

Rick: 00:12:25

Yeah [laugh] . I think the basic things are probably pretty much the same. I can’t think of anything other than the fact that you move more quickly from not being a manager to being a manager, of more people or more responsibility. I think that’s probably the major change. You know, I mean, I think it also depends on, you know, your industry and stuff like that whether the dynamics of your business change.

I think, change just is more rapid. I mean, you think right now about AI, for example. You know, what’s the effect going to be on me? So, I think the impact of external things is probably greater than it was. I think that predictability has gone down. That probably would be the main thing I would think is the biggest change.

Lenny: 00:13:23

Without having the same emphasis that you have on the topic, my guess would be that’s probably true because that seems to be the case with everything else.

Rick: 00:13:31

Right.

Lenny: 00:13:31

So, circling back to, from your experience on the three sides within the insight space, does that give you a specific set of recommendations or thoughts on the power of insights and information as an effective manager? Is that a lens that you use or is it just one tool in the toolbox? For me, you know, I’m a hammer, so everything looks like a nail, [laugh] right, so I think of everything through the lens of data and information and that’s just the context that I tend to view the world, and most problems that I encounter are from that perspective. When I think of the context of management, it’s pretty multi-dimensional. But does your experience coming up through research give you a specific bent that you try and impart to folks on the power and use of insights as a management tool?

Rick: 00:14:28

Yes. I think—and I’ve thought a lot about this in the past—and that is, I think one of the things that I—skills, hopefully, that I developed early on was, when I was at Yankelovich, I mean, the thing that was really valuable there was it was all hands on. That is, I wrote the questionnaire, I had to go down to the, you know, field department and listen to the interviews. I had to monitor them, I had to go to the coding department and make sure they were coding things right and see what the questions were they had. So, I was involved in all of that. And I also, because of the—particularly in designing questionnaires. And then one of the most profoundly embarrassing experiences I had as a young insights researcher was listening to an interviewer administer my questionnaire over the phone and hear how confused the respondent was, how the answer was not what I was—not that I wanted a specific answer, but they weren’t answering my question because I hadn’t asked it right.

So, it was that kind of profound understanding of the importance of clarity of communication, of listening to what’s going on. And I think that’s something that has, I hope, informed all of the stuff we’re doing on Management Mastery, for one, but also just by way of running an organization or managing people or managing projects or particularly relating to clients. I was struck by—I’ve been listening to some of your past podcasts I was—I’ll give a plug to one of your sponsors, Survey Monkey, their campaign of ‘Ask, Listen, Act,’ I thought, “That’s it.” That’s what we say, “How do you deal with a client?” You ask questions in a way that the—in this case, the client or the respondent—feels empowered to give an honest answer.

And by honest, I don’t mean they’re not lying to you because frankly, I don’t believe respondents lie to you; I believe they misunderstand what you’re asking, but to ask the right question and to listen to the answer and then act on that. But to make sure you’ve heard the answer they’re giving, which sometimes involves asking more questions. So, in that sense, yes. My background in insights research has, I think, guided me or influenced me in how I manage, to the extent that I do manage.

Lenny: 00:17:20

I appreciate you bringing up the Survey Monkey interview. It really was a good one in many ways. And that concept that you just nailed down of the ‘Act, Listen, Act,’ as you were talking, I don’t think I’d made that connection of, like, you know, that model works for just about anything, any situation: as a parent, as a manager, as an executive, as a researcher, it really does kind of drill down. [I think there’s] levels of nuance [laugh] —

Rick: 00:17:46

Yeah.

Lenny: 00:17:47

—especially in that part.

Rick: 00:17:47

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we have a couple of things on getting feedback, not just from your clients, but we have an episode coming up, getting feedback from your staff. And a key component of that is to create an atmosphere where they feel empowered and safe in giving you an answer that you may not want to hear. And so also, when we talk about clients because I know you’re—you know, several of your topics are about client-centered direction, and there, one of the things I’ve learned early on again is, clients are reluctant to give you bad news. If they’re not happy with you, they don’t always tell you; they just walk away.

So, it’s critical in building a relationship with a client that you anticipate that, that you, without even knowing oh, I think there may be a problem, going to the client on a regular basis and saying, “How’s everything going?” You know, Ed Koch, the former mayor of New York was always saying, “How am I doing?” And you want to do that and you want to do it in a way that you say, “I really want to know and I really want you to tell me if I’m not doing what you think I should be doing.” So, opening that communication is critical, whether you’re listening to your client, listening to your staff, listening to your boss. So, we stress that on a number of episodes.

Lenny: 00:19:18

So, if we’re thinking about the set of soft skills overall to be an effective manager, obviously listening and building that culture of trust, what else? Give me a kind of a top five of if you’re going to be successful, you need to get these muscles built up because they really are just critical to long-term success.

Rick: 00:19:41

Well, I think one of them, one more that we really haven’t talked about as much is—I mean, we have an up-and-coming episode in just that, and we say, the effective manager does a couple of things; one, he solves problems—or she—and the other is that they look for opportunities. And the good manager focuses on the opportunities while dealing with the critical problems. But you don’t—as, you know, the old saying goes, “When you’re up to your neck in alligators, it’s hard to keep your mind on the fact you’re supposed to be draining the swamp.” And that’s kind of where a good manager is; they’re always going to have problems being thrown at them, but they need to know, okay, how do I get ahead of this? What can I do that gives me, where am I opportunities to improve my ability to deal with the problems, I guess is—I know when I started at HBO for example, one of the reasons that they brought me in was that the research department was very reactive, in the sense that a client—the cable operator would say, well, we have this problem. Can you do a focus group for us? And they’d do the focus group and it would be fine, but that was all they did.

They just were order-takers. We’ll do this focus group, we’ll do this little survey, we’ll do this… and when I came in, I felt that the opportunity—and the industry was very young then. I mean, HBO was ten years old, but all of its growth was coming from distribution cable systems being franchised and built out and that sort of thing, so they had very little insight or awareness of what their real business was, in a way. I mean, they were handicapped by the fact that their end-user—the viewer—was not their customer. Their customer was the cable operator.

And I was struck by the fact that we really didn’t know much about the dynamics of our business. And I saw an opportunity there for our department to, if we could do the right, larger studies, get ahead of that and understand what our dynamics were and what was going on beneath the surface. So, we did a couple of fairly large strategic studies to give us insight into what the dynamic of our business was. And that enabled us to reduce the number of ad-hoc, kind of, focus group one-off studies that we did and provide much more meaningful strategic information both to our own management, but also to the cable operators who were our clients.

Lenny: 00:22:21

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And did that help that transformation? I remember vividly in the ’80s as HBO switched from basically, you know, wait until the movie comes to HBO, the rerun channel, to original content. So, was part of that strategy that you were involved with that helped inform that shift? And did that change the dynamic of who your customers were? I get that it was the cable companies, but by creating more original content, did that create a bridge for a different type of relationship, another constituency that helped inform all of your management decisions?

Rick: 00:23:23

Well, I don’t know—interestingly enough—I don’t know that original programming per se changed a lot. I mean, HBO had original programming almo—well, literally from day one. I mean, they had—their first day of broadcasting, they had, I believe it was Sometimes A Great Notion, and I think it was a hockey game. Now, it wasn’t a major league hockey game, but you know. And you know, there were certain original programs that really were tentpole.

I mean, clearly when we covered heavyweight boxing and Mike Tyson was everywhere, all the time, that people would subscribe to watch him fight. Those sorts of things. You know, so The Sopranos was another tentpole program that we had a feeling that people would sign up, just to get that. But the other thing that—and interestingly enough, I actually did this study before I went to HBO for the cable operator that I mentioned. One of the things that they were interested in was Showtime had just launched and they were taken aback, ‘they’ being this cable operator, was taken aback by the fact that they had subscribers that were subscribing to both.

And in those days, there weren’t exclusive movie contracts, so both channels had the same movies. And original programming was not the kind of powerhouse that it became, and so the question was, why are they doing that? And are they going to keep doing that? I mean, is there room for two? And I actually did—I was rather tickled with myself that I came up with this idea—we actually did longitudinal focus groups because the first set of groups I did, everybody said, “Oh, yeah I know. There’s some repeats and it’s all the same. And I’m going to drop one of them. I just have to decide which one I want to drop.”

And so, I went back a year later and interviewed, did focus groups with the same set of people. We did, I don’t know, two or three. And it was amazing. I mean, it was like we’d done the other ones the day before. And they said, “Yeah, I know I said, but I still have it. And I just can’t get around.”

And so, one of the things that came—well, two things came out of that: one was that the friend of a subscription business is inertia, and the second one was, what they were buying was choice. And they actually said this. “When I turn my television on, I want two buttons I can push not just one because it’ll be something different on the other one. I may have seen it before, but it’s different.” And that sort of opened the door for Cinemax, it opened the door for the Movie Channel. It said they’ll take them all. And that eventually led to what we called for a long time Multiplex, which is, now there are, you know, zillion HBOs and Cinemaxes and Movie Cha—you know, because people wanted that kind of variety.

Lenny: 00:26:25

Mmm. That is, yeah. I’ve [seen] where—I’ve [seen] —I’m one of those guys that I’ll just pay for the whole damn package, right? And we have five or six different streaming—

Rick: 00:26:36

Yeah. And I’ll bet there are two or three of those, you keep saying, “I got to cancel that. I haven’t watched anything on it in months.”

Lenny: 00:26:43

Yes, yes. But, oh, well.

Rick: 00:26:45

Yeah.

Lenny: 00:26:45

Keep doing that. So, that’s a great quote: “A friend of subscription business is inertia.” There’s a management tip—

Rick: 00:26:53

Yeah.

Lenny: 00:26:53

—build a subscription business.

Rick: 00:26:54

Well, yeah—

Lenny: 00:26:56

[laugh] .

Rick: 00:26:56

—this is the other thing that, it was an experience I had; it was a lunch. And at the time—well, at the time, HBO was owned by Time Inc., the magazine company, and one of the things that we kept discussing in management at HBO is, what business are we in? I mean, we don’t sell widgets, we don’t deal with consumers, per se, we deal with cable operators. We—you know, what is this business? And I had lunch with the head of research for Time Inc., for the magazine group. And I brought this question up.

And he kind of leans back and looks at me, and he says, “You’re in the subscription business.” And I said, “What do you mean?” And we had just done a bunch of studies to figure—we didn’t even know what our churn rate was. We didn’t even know how many subscribers we were turning over and how long they lasted when we sold them. And he said, “Your churn rate is 50% a year and we just figured that out.”

And I go, [laugh] , “Oh?” And he said, “Your subscriber life is about 18 months.” And I said, “How on earth did you know that?” He says, “Those are exactly the numbers for Time magazine. Like I said, you’re in the subscription business. And what’s interesting, just from a broader perspective, is that almost a rule of nature.” And he said, “The only exception to that—at least in the magazine business—is Sports Illustrated or any other special interest publication where somebody is—you know, Photography Magazine, would probably be another one. Then subscriber life is, once they get it, they don’t leave it.”

And [laugh] my daughter was, for a long time, a marketing director for Crunch Fitness, sold memberships. She came home one day, and she says—because she was living with me at the time—she said, “We had a very interesting meeting today. We talked about churn.” And I said, “Don’t tell me, half of your subscribers disconnect or leave you every year and the average life of a subscriber is 18 months.” Her eyes got huge and she said, “How did you know that?” I said, “You’re in this subscription business.” So, it applies across things.

So, there are those kinds of insights, that I think—one of the things I think is problematic in the insight business, as I understand—is, we make assumptions that things are different when they really aren’t or they’re the same when they really aren’t. And I think sometimes we have—for example, at HBO when I first started, if somebody installed us and disconnected us when we’d renew, we’d call them, “Trier rejecters.” We said, “Well, they tried it, they didn’t like it, they’re not coming back, so we got to move on.” And our ad agency at the time actually did a spreadsheet where they said, you know, “In X years, you’re going to be out of people to market to because they will either be your subscribers or they will have tried you and rejected you.”

Well, the same lunch I had with the magazine guy says, “Ah ah ah, they’re your best prospects. They will be back. And we know that, and we make every attempt, when you drop a magazine, we make X number of attempts to get you back and we know the return on every one of those, and they are your best prospects.” And he was absolutely right. Because we’re in the subscription business.

He said they drop you for other reasons: financial reasons, they move, our happiest subscribers were our young subscribers, so they have a very unstable life, so you know, they have to move in and move out and do all of that sort of stuff. And this flew in the face of, again, our assumption early on at HBO was, we measured what we call total subscriber satisfaction. We did diary studies with Nielsen where not only did we say, “Did you watch this program,” but we said, “How much did you like this program?” And one of the unsettling findings we found a couple of years later was that our happiest subs were the most likely to disconnect. The highest churn rate we had was amongst our happy subs. Because they were our youngest subs.

So, you know, we were just as guilty as a lot of people of having assumptions of how our business worked without testing them out, without really looking under the hood and saying, “Is that really what’s going on?” And I think that’s a mistake researchers make a lot. And I’m not singling them out; I think businesses make it a lot.

Lenny: 00:31:42

Well, managers as well.

Rick: 00:31:43

Yeah.

Lenny: 00:31:43

That’s a powerful lesson. You know, knowing what you don’t know. And the older I get, the more—there’s definitely a growing body of confidence of, like, “I got this,” but there’s also an absolute awareness of, but don’t get cocky because there’s a lot that I don’t know, and keeping that curiosity and that willingness to learn is… it’s become hugely important for me, I think. There’s more things that I try and learn today than maybe in my heyday of, you know, running companies when I didn’t have time to learn anything new, then. It was just trying to keep your head above water. But yeah, there’s a whole lot more that I recognize that I don’t know today than there ever was before in my life. And I’m grateful for that. I also don’t manage anybody [laugh] anymore, so, but I’m still grateful that I have the opportunity to learn because yeah, life is, it’s changing.

Rick: 00:32:42

Oh, yeah. No, it’s like Reagan said about Russia. And, you know, it’s the same about, quote-unquote, “Facts.” You can trust them, but verify, you know? I think it’s always important to say, “Do I really know that? Is there a way I can verify that?”

And I think that’s, you know, in managing a research staff, I think you want to encourage that in your staff, to question the assumptions, you know, and in a collegial way, you know, ask questions of your colleagues: “Are you really sure about that?” Or, you know, “How do we know that for sure?” And be open to being asked that yourself and being ready to say, “Here’s why I think that’s the case.”

Lenny: 00:33:24

Yeah. Now, Rick, I want to be conscious of your time and time of our listeners, so let’s head towards wrapping up, but before we do that, is there anything that I didn’t ask or we haven’t talked about that you wanted to touch on?

Rick: 00:33:38

Gee, there were a few things I didn’t know you were going to ask [laugh] .

Lenny: 00:33:44

[laugh] . Well, I got to keep people guessing. So.

Rick: 00:33:45

Well, you did. No, I think that’s… covers a lot of it. You know, we can’t do everything in an hour. But no, I don’t think of anything right offhand that you haven’t really asked or touched upon.

Lenny: 00:34:03

Okay. Well, I appreciate that. That’s honest feedback. So—

Rick: 00:34:08

Unless Natalie is behind you screaming at you [laugh] , “Why didn’t you ask him that?”

Lenny: 00:34:13

She is not. She is not. So—that hasn’t happened yet. We haven’t had Natalie, our producer, come in and beat me over the head, yet. But I’m sure it will happen at some point. Where can people find you? Where can people find the podcast? Where can they subscribe? You’re in the subscription business now—

Rick: 00:34:32

That’s right I am. We’re on—as they say, wherever you get your podcasts, Spotify, Management Mastery. You can reach me at—this is out of the blue, but careercoachclass.com. We have a series of online classes that you can sign up for.

It’s not about management per se, but there’s a website there and you can leave me a message. But also—I’m at great risk to myself and my spam folder—my email is pretty easy. It’s rickkendall@me.com. So, but listen to the podcast and you can send your comments there.

Lenny: 00:35:13

Absolutely. And when we post this in our [show notes] , we’ll see if we can actually create that link there as well, do some cross-pollination, and encourage everybody to check it out. We’ve actually—this has been a topic that’s just come up kind of organically. We’ve been talking a few different shows—I’m not sure if they’ve aired yet—but around different dimensions of career growth and management and being entrepreneurs, and this just kind of popped up in the zeitgeist, so I’m glad that we had this conversation as well.

Rick: 00:35:41

You know, it’s interesting. Fred and I started out by doing—he’s written—he and his wife have written three books on how to get a job, you know, networking and interviewing and all of that, and we met with somebody, a senior executive that he was working with and we were telling him what we were doing, and he said, “Well, you should talk to this guy who has just joined me as a young staffer and see what he thinks of your idea.” And so, we went and talked to the guy and we said, “We’re doing this thing about how to get a job.” And he said, “You know,” he said, “I just got hired here. There were a zillion places online to how to get a job, how to do an interview, all of that.” He says, “I’ve just started this job. There’s nothing for me. There’s nothing to tell me, now you got the job. Now, what do you do?”

So, that sent us on this, you know, mission. And when we did our bit of market research, there wasn’t a lot for managers, either. There’s some, but usually it’s a B-School, and it’s kind of an online B-School class. It’s not really, as you called it, the soft skills.

Lenny: 00:36:45

Yeah, I think my career, it was the school of hard knocks, right?

Rick: 00:36:49

[laugh] . Yes, that’s right.

Lenny: 00:36:51

I mean, [laugh] , you know, luckily I had some mentors along the way, but most of the time, it was like, “Oh, that didn’t work.” So [laugh] —

Rick: 00:36:56

But we all have bruises. Yes.

Lenny: 00:36:58

Yeah. Rick, it’s a real pleasure. Congratulations on the podcast.

Rick: 00:37:03

Thank you.

Lenny: 00:37:03

I think that’s fantastic. Love it when folks try and distill their knowledge and share it with others as well. So, tip—maybe—podcasts. Also, if you haven’t checked out Substack. Substack, it’s a subscription business blog, basically, where people subscribe, but it is rapidly becoming the home of subject matter experts.

So, rather than kind of a general blog, it really is this place where you go, if I want to learn about this, if you’re going to Substack, you’re going to find somebody who is an expert on that topic and—

Rick: 00:37:32

Interesting.

Lenny: 00:37:32

It’s so maybe something to think about.

Rick: 00:37:34

I’ve heard of it. I just have never—I’ve never looked into it.

Lenny: 00:37:37

Yeah. And their model is, they manage—it’s you can be free, or they manage subscriptions for your readers and they, kind of, help and promote it and everything. I’m kind of embarrassed to say,I subscribed to probably about 80 different Substacks—

Rick: 00:37:52

Wow.

Lenny: 00:37:52

—right now. But I don’t pay for all of them, so I’m sorry any Substack authors; I’m one of the freebie on most of them. But it’s just addictive. It’s just a great place to find subject matter experts. So.

Rick: 00:38:05

Interesting. That’s what I need: a new addiction.

Lenny: 00:38:07

[laugh] . You can thank me later.

Rick: 00:38:10

Yeah [laugh] .

Lenny: 00:38:11

[laugh] . All right. Rick, it’s a pleasure. Thank you to our audience. I appreciate you taking the time to listen to Rick and I chat. Big thanks to Natalie, our producer; our editor, James, to our sponsor, Dig Insights. And we will be back again with a new episode of the Greenbook Podcast soon. Thanks a lot. Bye-bye.