320 Reboot Your Leadership: The CEO Whisperer Jerry Colonna on Humanity, Courageous Leadership, and Belonging | Partnering Leadership Global Thought Leader

[00:00:00] Mahan Tavakoli: Jerry Colonna, welcome to Partnering Leadership. I am thrilled and honored to have you in this conversation with me. 

[00:00:07] Jerry Colonna: It's a delight to be with you and I have to tell you that I wish everybody could see the smile that is on your face because you're lighting up my day

[00:00:16] Mahan Tavakoli: jerry, I have been glowing all day thinking about this conversation. Your approach, your book reboot. And now Reunion have had a significant impact on me, both on my own leadership and how I guide and coach other CEOs and leaders. So you have been a guide for me, which is why it's such a joy to get a chance to share some of your insights with me.

[00:00:42] My audience. Now I know Jerry, you've thought a lot about your upbringing and its impact on you. And it is the first question I ask my guests would love to know a little bit more about your upbringing in Brooklyn. And how it has contributed to who you have become. 

[00:01:01] Jerry Colonna: I think that the strategies I developed as a child have at times served me exceedingly well.

[00:01:09] And at times stood in the way of me being the adult, the CEO, the coach, the partner, the father that I would like to be probably the most meaningful piece of that childhood the one that had the most impact. Is what I would define as hypervigilance.

[00:01:34] For context I grew up in a really challenging family, in a challenging environment, and to be clear, and bizarrely, there was an enormous amount of love, but there was also an enormous amount of mental illness. And to be more specific, my mother was diagnosed as bipolar schizoid affective disorder maybe 10, 15 years after most of her acting out.

[00:02:11] Became a parent. Starting when I was three weeks old, I'm number six of seven kids, starting about when I was three weeks old, she started regularly being hospitalized, sometimes for weeks at a time. So that phenomena of a parent disappearing became a part of my childhood.

[00:02:35] Concomitant with that was my father's alcoholism and his depression, and his ability to cope not only with my mother's illness, but with his own challenged upbringing, which I write about fairly extensively in my new book, Reunion created a kind of incendiary, sometimes explosive, And the result was that like a lot of folks I developed a kind of hyper awareness of the unspoken, unsaid things going on in the room.

[00:03:11] It kept me safe. To know from, say, the sound of my father's footsteps as he was coming home at night, whether or not it was going to be a good night or a bad night.

[00:03:24] The irony, of course, is that as an adult, first as a reporter, then as an investor, and then later as a coach, I use that very same capacity to do the work that I do. So sometimes people feel that I can be a little uncanny when they will ask a question and then I will respond with a question that is about what's behind their question.

[00:03:54] It's basically because I'm listening to a hyper attuned intuition which I developed as a kid.

[00:04:00] Mahan Tavakoli: I've heard some of your conversations on your reboot podcast as well, Jerry, you have that uncanny ability and you also have the courage that has to go along with it to ask those questions.

[00:04:15] But one part that the audience might not be familiar with yet is that at 38. You were the Prince of New York. Top of the game in venture capital, and you gave it up

[00:04:30] Jerry Colonna: to reframe what you've said, what happened was as I often describe it, my lifelong relationship with depression, which went back to my childhood, which boiled over in some ways when I was 18 with a Suicide attempt that landed me in the hospital for six months came back with an engines in my thirties.

[00:04:55] And as I often described, what was happening was that the more successful I became, the more dissonant my life felt. The more I felt that I was living a hollow, shallow lie. And your recollection of the phrase, the princes of New York. That was actually applied to my partner, Fred Wilson, and I in response to the success that we were having in a venture capital firm that was launched in 1996.

[00:05:30] The important part of that story is that the more success I had, the worse I felt. And that's one of those unexpected consequences that, forgive me, I'm about to curse, is a mind fuck. Because when you're starting to manifest what you think you're supposed to be, when you start to live a life that everyone else externally would be envious of, and you feel worse, you're left with an awful conclusion that there is something wrong with you.

[00:06:16] And I already had a proclivity for depression. I already had a proclivity for kind of a hyper performative nature. By the time I was 38, the external environment had collapsed. Everything being an internet related investor had gone from, as one friend put it, went from the penthouse to the doghouse, right?

[00:06:42] And all of a sudden, I found myself in a place where nothing I had built in my twenties and thirties made sense anymore. And so you could argue it was the beginning of a midlife reexamination, or you could say it was an extension of the childhood depression. All I know is that my inside and my outside were out of alignment.

[00:07:10] And I needed to get right with myself now, pause as a result of getting right with myself, I became a coach, so I didn't leave the venture capital business to become a coach. I left the venture capital business to become myself. And all of a sudden, I realized that being myself meant using my innate childhood survival strategies.

[00:07:43] To respond to the world in a different way. So I coach, because this is who I am, I didn't choose to become a coach 

[00:07:54] Mahan Tavakoli: You're called the CEO whisperer, known as someone that sometimes makes CEOs cry because you ask those hard questions.

[00:08:01] Not just 

[00:08:01] Jerry Colonna: CEOs, 

[00:08:02] Mahan Tavakoli:  I wonder, is it that people who are able to reach those levels as founders or CEOs of organizations have so much lacking that they are able to become successful or is it that Success leaves them feeling hollow. You've dealt with a lot of these folks and I see a lot of CEOs that would say some of the same things, maybe not as eloquently as you said, in terms of some of the hollowness that they feel, why do you think that is?

[00:08:43] Jerry Colonna: I think this relates back to the jokes that I and a lot of folks who interview me make about making people cry. I think we live in a society, at least those of us in the West live in a society where children are socialized to not feel. And that we associate The capacity to not feel with some sort of strength, some sort of ability to, as I write about in Reboot, the ability to take a punch. Begins very early on. Think about yourself as a child. And think about falling and skinning your knee. In so many cultures, the first response is, shh, don't cry. And it's presented as a form of comfort.

[00:09:37] But it's actually a very confusing message to the child. Because it implies almost immediately that there's something wrong with feeling. When skinning your knee hurts, an appropriate response to hurt

[00:09:55] I mentioned that we cultivate this image of resilience as the ability to take a punch. And I often joke that when I was a boxer, which I boxed for many years the goal was to not get punched. The goal wasn't to be able to stand there and take a punch. The goal was to actually slip the punch.

[00:10:19] And I think that's an important distinction. So what we have is a whole cohort, if you will, of people who have been socialized to be distant from and to intellectualize their way around their very human experience. And then. A guy like me shows up, and I start asking questions, as you point out, that people don't typically ask.

[00:10:54] I've come to understand that I do it in a way where I create space for the other person to actually feel what they're really feeling. And the consequence of that, oftentimes, is that they feel tears. Or they feel the sadness. They become consciously aware of the hollowness that they're carrying around.

[00:11:21] And I don't know if this is true, but it feels like it might be true. In part because they encounter someone who seems to have the capacity to hold. the consequence of their feeling hollow. See, I don't say, shh, don't cry. I say, I understand. Because invariably I do.

[00:11:46] Mahan Tavakoli: You have that humanity, Jerry, that is lacking in so many of our interactions and to a certain extent we've moved it out of our organizations and in leadership. I couldn't agree with you more in that much of what we celebrate in leadership is counter to the humanity that Many of us seek to you give permission to these CEOs to get in touch with their own humanity.

[00:12:18] You also have written. Another brilliant book reunion. You say this book began with a knee on a neck. Would love for you to explain. What started it, but how you see that therefore relating to leadership and how we lead ourselves, our organizations and in the community?

[00:12:46] Jerry Colonna:  The first thing I'll say is that before Reboot was published, it was published in July 2019. I and the marketing team. Behind the book, gathered in New York, we had a kind of kickoff meeting and there was a young woman, Lily was her name, who was an intern.

[00:13:07] She's 21 years old and she was an intern at the social media marketing firm that I had hired to help with the book and we all were checking in and she had spent the weekend reading Reboot and I'll never forget what she said about the book because she was not whom I pictured Reading a book about leadership written by the quote CEO whisperer, she said, this book gave me permission to be me.

[00:13:38] And I think that I did not realize it at the time, but, what I did with Reboot by leaning into the question of what does it really mean to be a better leader? What does it mean, as I say in the book, to be a better human? What does it mean to finally grow up? I did not realize how universal that question was.

[00:14:07] It's important to answer the question about reunion and the setup for that. It's important to understand that's the context. Where most of the last 20, 25 years of my life has been focused on is creating the conditions for people to deal with the things that stop them from being fully human and for living a life where the inner and the outer resonate in are in alignment.

[00:14:35] Okay, so that's the setup

[00:14:42] in the spring of 2020, not only did the pandemic start, but in May. George Floyd was murdered. Under the knee of a police officer and most of the world that I know watch that video again and again and that video that ends with him crying for his mom.

[00:15:14] There was something about that video, that kicked off this inner reflection process. And unfortunately it feels like that reflection process has ended. But, at the time, something was happening. And many people, took to the streets to protest.

[00:15:37] Some see those protests as violent. Others see those protests as justified. I'm not here to debate that. I'm just here to tell a quick story. That among the people who were protesting was my daughter, who spent most of her teenage years rolling her eyes at her father, appropriately whose fierceness Led her to hold my feet to the fire and say things like, dad, it's not enough to be an ally, say, for social justice.

[00:16:10] One has to be a co conspirator for justice. And so one night she's protesting, she's with a group of about 5, 000 people from Brooklyn, marching from the Barclays Center across the Manhattan Bridge. Into Manhattan, and police on horseback come from behind, and police on horseback come from the front. And suddenly she and these 5, 000 protesters, peaceful protesters, are trapped in the middle of the bridge.

[00:16:45] And she's texting me because she's scared. And I begin giving her advice on what to do if she got pepper sprayed. And the important thing about that story was in that moment I realized that a guy who had dedicated himself to this notion that better humans make better leaders was safe and sound on a 40 acre farm.

[00:17:14] In very white, Colorado, far from the protests, far from putting his life on the line. And it was my daughter, who in the middle of a pandemic, which, forget your views about mass for a moment, we didn't know if this thing was ever going to end. And she's in the middle of this crowd, teaching her father, what does it mean to stand up for social justice?

[00:17:49] What does it mean to speak up? What does it mean to be a co conspirator?

[00:17:56]  I wrote Rebirth retrospectively. This is what happened to me. Reunion, which has a similar voice, but a completely different trajectory. Was written as it was happening to me, because my brave daughter sent me spinning where she forced me to not only reconsider all that I knew to be true, but expand the notion that it's not enough just to create, say, more humane workspaces.

[00:18:38] Jerry Colonna: It's not enough to live a more conscious leadership life. That if one is not actively participating in creating love, safety, and most importantly, belonging to the world, then, to use phrasing that I use often in Reunion, one is not being the ancestor. One's descendants deserve. So what started with a knee on the neck became this deep and profound exploration into the question.

[00:19:14] What is a leader's responsibility in a world? Forgive me. I'm about to be dramatic where babies are murdered. Because of ideology.

[00:19:30] Babies are murdered in retribution for some imagined or real hurt.

[00:19:39] Will we allow someone who loves differently from us, looks different from us, exists in a different way, worships a god in a different way? To be murdered. I want to be clear, human beings have been doing this for millennia.

[00:20:03] What is our responsibility? And reunion is my answer to that question. , I was speaking in a conference here last night and someone said to me what are you supposed to do? I said, I wrote a book. What are you doing? 

[00:20:22] Mahan Tavakoli: You both wrote a book, Jerry, and you are using your platform 

[00:20:28] to inform, educate, enlighten, and move people. . So what will it take for us to truly make progress rather than make statements or start initiatives that I've seen many organizations start for that greater belonging and understanding that doesn't really go anywhere.

[00:20:52] Jerry Colonna: God bless you for asking that question. I think you're absolutely right. You're right. The first line of reunion is, this book began with a knee on the neck. I could not conceive the possibility that as divided and as antagonistic and as polarized as this country was, and arguably the world was, That it would actually get worse.

[00:21:19] And it has gotten worse. So chapter five, which I call the wages of separation, in which I try to lay out what's at stake for us living in a world in which we're so divided. Chapter five was written shortly after the shooting, Evaldi, Texas. And the first line of that chapter was changed because my editor said to me.

[00:21:50] It's going to locate it too close to a particular point in time. But the first line that I wrote was, they've not yet finished burying the babies in Uvalde, Texas.

[00:22:03] I resurfaced that right now

[00:22:08] because in the intervening years, it feels like we've become, been numbed to mass shootings in the United States. We've become numb to the fact that

[00:22:23] Guns and shooting are the number one cause of death of children under the age of 17 in 2024.

[00:22:36] And you asked the right question is, what will it take?  I want to be clear and make a through line. In my view, in my observation, and I'm not setting myself up as an expert, I'm studiously avoiding the notion that I have an answer. What I have is a responsibility to ask questions. And I am going to ask questions that I know need to be discussed.

[00:23:13] What has happened is our capacity to dehumanize each other, whether it's because of race, because of economic status, Because of immigrant status, because of nation of origin, because of the way we worship God, our capacity to dehumanize feels like it's accelerating.

[00:23:43] And for me to be the ancestor that my descendants deserve, I feel a moral responsibility. To ask questions. We're both coaches. Our main tool is a well asked question.

[00:24:01] Let me give you a question that comes from Wendell Berry. Wendell Berry, who, as he's gotten older, he's 89 now, he continues to challenge us. And this is from a poem called Questionnaire. I won't read the whole thing because it's too long, but it's written with a kind of sarcastic bent to it.

[00:24:24] And you have to imagine a series of questions. And he asks five questions.

[00:24:31] How much poison are you willing to eat for the success of the free market and global trade? Please name your preferred poisons for the sake of goodness. How much evil are you willing to do

[00:24:55] in the name of patriotism and the flag? How much of our beloved land are you willing to desecrate?

[00:25:06] And this is the hardest question he asks. State briefly, the ideas, ideals, or hopes, the energy sources, the kinds of security for which you would kill a child, name please, the children whom you would be willing to kill.

[00:25:28] That is a message from one of our elders,

[00:25:32] and when we think about the world in which we operate, where we're trying to help business leaders grow past their demons, grow into their strength as leaders.

[00:25:45] I'm not suggesting that every CEO has to ask themselves, especially that last question, but we live in a world where that question is relevant.

[00:26:02] And for me to live up to the exhortation of my daughter, dad, it's not enough to be an ally, you have to be a co conspirator.

[00:26:15] I am not shying away anymore. I'm leaning into the tough spot.

[00:26:22] Mahan Tavakoli: You are leaning in, which is what adds beauty and strength to what you do, Jerry. I absolutely loved the quote you started your chapter seven with from the Talmud.

[00:26:40] It is not your duty to finish the work, but neither are you at liberty to neglect it. 

[00:26:50] Jerry Colonna: Isn't that amazing, that quote? That is wisdom for the ages. And I hear you. Look, we look at the dumpster fire that is the world. We look at the way we treat each other. It would be a natural human response to be overwhelmed and to feel hopeless.

[00:27:11] And that quote actually gives me hope. Because there's permission in the first half, it is not up to you to complete the work. Which means I do not have to heal The whole world. But I have more agency than I pretend I have. And with that agency comes a responsibility to not neglect the work. I remember years and years ago, a woman who's now become a very close friend called me up. She's the head of learning and development for a large software company, and she told me that health care claims for depression and anxiety for the children of the top executives. Had gone up 35 40 percent over the preceding year. If people who are in a position to do something aren't moved by the suffering of Children then I don't know what will do it.

[00:28:13] And as someone who has had a personal relationship with suicidal ideation and depression, both in myself and in my children,

[00:28:24] this to me is the most important work of my life.

[00:28:27] Even if someone wants to say to me the equivalent of shut up and dribble, shut up and go do the work that we wanted you to do, that we loved you for doing before I would not be able to live with myself if I did that. 

[00:28:40] That's what I love about you and your work, Jerry, that humanity is a big part of the mandate of leadership. So what you are saying is what we need more of in all of our leaders, rather than saying, no, stick to just the PNL and this specific focus that you have with your organization.

[00:29:02] Jerry Colonna: Bless you for saying that

[00:29:04] from the bottom of my heart. Thank you. Because there are times when I doubt it. Just a few weeks ago, I sat with my mentor and teacher, Parker Palmer. He had just turned 85 and I got a chance to spend a couple of days, literally just sitting on his back porch talking. We talked about the obligation to be fierce with one's truth and hearing you affirm that's important.

[00:29:36] Is very moving for me. Thank you. I know no other way to be 

[00:29:45] Mahan Tavakoli: To do 

[00:29:45] Jerry Colonna: less would be a betrayal of my own senses of who I am. 

[00:29:51] Mahan Tavakoli: You are staying true to that and we are not doing anything worthy if there aren't naysayers out there. Now one of the things I love is you talk in your book about the importance of understanding our ancestors and their stories. How does that relate to being able to better connect to and have that greater sense of belonging that you talk about?

[00:30:16] Jerry Colonna: Of the things I came to understand. Was and this came to me through reading James Baldwin's essay, The Price of the Ticket. In this essay, he talks about the price of the ticket towards whiteness. And he's speaking primarily about the descendants of European immigrants, like my family.

[00:30:39] And he talks about the ways in which giving up the connection to our ancestors. As part of this movement towards the safety of the dominant group creates a loss, it's the price of the ticket to safety, price of the ticket to the dominant class. And what's lost is our connection to the reality of what they experienced.

[00:31:14] Now, as I started to explore that, I realized that there were a couple of things like Many of my ancestors came from Southern Italy, and I only knew the romantic side of that experience, a sanitized view of that. I didn't really understand what the experience of poverty in that region was like, nor did I understand the poverty and what the experience was like when they came to the United States.

[00:31:47] Thank you very much. And it needs to be said, they came when the current immigration laws were not in place. So there's a myth, for example, that is very dominant in my family, which is they came legally. They came, quote unquote, legally because the 1929 immigration acts weren't in place. That made certain things illegal.

[00:32:15] They didn't come under the same circumstances that immigrants to the United States are facing.

[00:32:22] But the interesting question there was, why did many of the, say, descendants of Italians in the United States, why do they look at what's going on, say, at the southern border of the United States, Not with an empathetic understanding, but with a kind of dispassionate distancing that says why can't they be like us?

[00:32:48] And it was a realization that there's a myth. That goes along. And so part of creating the conditions where I might participate in a co conspiratorial way for the belonging of others, requires me to reunite not only with the myths of my ancestors, but the truth of their experience, which more often than not, as we think back to our family trees.

[00:33:19] The truth gets lost, right? We don't talk about our queer ancestors. We don't talk about our ancestors who suffered depression. We don't talk about our ancestors who may have committed murder. We don't talk about poverty in that way. We romanticize it. And I think in order for us to lay the conditions for what I refer to as systemic belonging, We have to welcome it all in, even the parts that we'd really rather not talk about.

[00:33:54] What I see is a beautiful parallel. You talked in Reboot about the impact of radical self inquiry.  You coined that term. And it's one of the things that I see as critical for leaders and lacking a lot of times, Jerry with CEOs, that real self inquiry and understanding of the self

[00:34:19] Mahan Tavakoli: and on a broader belonging level, the stories that we tell ourselves, including the stories of our ancestors, has an influence on how we relate to others and how willing we are to empathize and see their experiences for what they truly are, rather than separating us from them. 

[00:34:47]  That's absolutely right, I'll speak about immigrants from southern Italy at the beginning of the 20th century, for example, the myth that many Italian Americans carry is  that quote, they came here legally.

[00:35:02] Jerry Colonna: Okay, what does that mean? It means they were processed through Ellis Island. Or in some rare cases, Angel Island on the West Coast, but mostly through Ellis Island, and that somehow they didn't violate any laws. The truth is that there were laws on the books that said and this is an interesting fact, you could not come to the United States and take a job from an American citizen.

[00:35:29] And yet, when my grandfather, who was the first of many to come, when he would come and he set up a business, all of his cousins, all these people came and they had jobs immediately. If my family had followed the law, my grandfather, instead of hiring relatives to come work for him, he would have hired the folks who were already here.

[00:35:57] So they did come illegally. It wasn't until 1929 that through an extension of what are known as the Chinese exclusion acts became much wider and there was a eugenics movement that talked about the races of Southern Europe, Greece, Italy, Spain, and I won't go into all the nerdish details about it, but they're fascinating details about the quotas that were put in place.

[00:36:29] specifically to preserve a predominantly Northern European interpretation of what it meant to be white. And so this whole structure of how we look and say, this is what happened, why can't they, this is premised on a myth. It's premised on a disconnection from the reality of the experience.

[00:36:57] The reality of the experience is that they did break laws. They just broke different laws because the other laws weren't in place yet.

[00:37:10] Mahan Tavakoli: This is a level of self inquiry and understanding these stories that I found more people doing post George Floyd. Post COVID for a whole host of reasons, people became a lot more reflective, whether in their own personal lives or organizations. There was a lot more alignment around these issues. If anything, The pendulum has swung and people say this is white shaming let's just move on. So what will it take for us to actually make progress, rather than go back 

[00:37:46] Jerry Colonna: I'm not sure what it will take ultimately and I acknowledge everything that you said about this kind of weird, strange, threatened backlash, and this obsession with this concept of wokeness, which For the life of me seems as nebulous and shifting as anything else out there, but I do know this and I'll speak from my own identity as a white cisgender straight man of Italian and Irish ancestry.

[00:38:19] I don't think it will change if folks who identify as I do. Don't say anything. Part of the reaction to my book, which was expected, was folks who identify differently from a different place, looking at me and saying, what do you have to speak about these things? And it's an understandable reaction.

[00:38:44] And my response, which is not a shutdown answer, but really comes from a place of curiosity is, what do I have not to speak of these things? Because all I can say, and you have confirmed. My observation is it's getting worse. It's getting worse. Last summer, Anheuser Busch and its pairing company had to shut down an advertising campaign that was on TikTok because they had hired a trans woman, I believe, As a spokesperson for Bud Light, who cares what is it?

[00:39:25] How does this matter? I love that you're laughing, right? It's absurd. Target, the store gets targeted because they have t shirts with rainbows on them. For heaven's sake, what? In the meantime, we're burying 4th graders who were shot by a mentally ill 17 year old, or 18 year old, or 20 year old, or whatever the hell he was.

[00:39:59] What are we doing? We had a presidential candidate who talked about a state being the place where woke goes to die, and banning math books. Math books because of this demonization of the exploration of the experience of 50, 60, 70 percent of Americans. Stop. This is nonsense.

[00:40:27] We have a climate in crisis. We have economic upheaval around the world. We have land wars we have one side threatening to explode nuclear weapons in space. And we're fighting about t shirts? Come on.

[00:40:47] I love the way you put it, Jerry. First of all, what do I have not to speak out on this? And secondarily, part of what I love about you is the fact that in my view, organizations are.

[00:41:04] Mahan Tavakoli: Some of the last vestiges of groups where people feel a sense of belonging and connection to, therefore the CEOs of those organizations have a lot more influence on their people, and impact on the community. And you have a platform.

[00:41:25] and credibility with these folks. So what you say resonates very differently, which is why it's important. And I am glad that you speak out. Will there be people who will say you've gone off the rails? Of course, you wouldn't be saying anything of substance if they didn't say that. However, you have the credibility with the people that I believe can actually move the needle and make a difference.

[00:41:56] I am really trying to live up to that teaching from the Talmud. Feels a call to action, neither are you listener at liberty to ignore the work.

[00:42:07] Jerry Colonna: What's at stake are our descendants lives.

[00:42:13] That's what's at stake. And I agree with you, the promise of business is the good it can do. Which we often bypass, unfortunately in our culture, business leaders are vilified. Because the struggles and the journeys of being a leader in a business environment are not really fully appreciated, not well known, partially because we don't do a good job talking about it, but there is an opportunity to develop the kind of purpose and meaning that can create a path through our own individual suffering by dedicating ourselves to the work that the Talmud.

[00:42:58] offers us. Yeah, it's all of our responsibilities working towards healing the world. And that's a gift. It's not just a responsibility. 

[00:43:10] Mahan Tavakoli: It is a gift. And as long as we have guiding lights like you, Jerry, we will continue making progress, taking advantage of that gift of making a difference. I love the quote. It is not our duty to finish the work, but we aren't at liberty to neglect it. We can't sit back and say, let's wait for someone else to address it, someone else to lead this change, or be overwhelmed with all of the things that are going on and not make a difference, which is why I really appreciate what you have done.

[00:43:49] with your leadership. And you, Jerry have the credibility with, and the ear of a lot of CEOs and a lot of executives that I believe can make a difference when they take on the responsibility and the challenge.

[00:44:06] that you throw down including in your outstanding new book reunion. 

[00:44:11] Jerry Colonna: I would close with a question and an expansion on what we were just talking about part of the way I interpret that quote from the Talmud. Is when the rabbi says. It is not up to us to complete the work. What I also hear is, it is not up to us to succeed the work. And that's a really important teaching. It's subtle, but it's really important. Because what is implicit in that is, I know you might fail.

[00:44:46] I know that I will not succeed.

[00:44:52] And that is not an excuse not to try. Which is a very hard thing to internalize when my leadership is so bound up with my sense of accomplishment and my sense of achievement. But the stakes are too high to wait until you know that you will succeed. And the second thing is a question that I would leave you with.

[00:45:20] I'm famous for my questions. My question in Reboot was how have I been complicit in creating the conditions I say I don't want? I morphed that question in Reunion to how have I been complicit in and benefited from the conditions in the world I say I don't want? But you know what? That's not the most important question.

[00:45:39] The most important question is what am I willing to give up that I love in order to see the world that I know needs to be?

[00:45:52] That's the question that I think we all have to grapple with. Am I willing to give up the feeling of being loved, the feeling of being safe, and even my own sense of belonging, so that somebody else can feel those things? That's the challenge. That's the question. I don't have perfect answers. My book It's a conversation starter, not a conversation ender.

[00:46:19] So my hope and my wish is that people use this book to ask themselves some really tough questions so that they can lay the ground, so that they can participate in creating a world that their descendants deserve.

[00:46:37] Mahan Tavakoli: Jerry Warrenberger. Who I had on the podcast and I love his work it's written a book of beautiful questions and a more beautiful question.

[00:46:46] You are a master of asking beautiful questions. So I appreciate those for the audience to find out more about you, follow your work and your book, where would you send them to? 

[00:47:02] Jerry Colonna: They can just go to the company website, reboot. io. There is a specific website for the new book, reunion. reboot. io. 

[00:47:11] We did create a 3 episode podcast, a short limited series podcast called stories of belonging. I think it's beautiful. Play around look at those things and consider your own story of belonging. 

[00:47:27] Mahan Tavakoli: You are a beautiful man, Jerry, with a lot of beautiful questions. And as I mentioned at the beginning of the conversation, I have learned a lot from you.

[00:47:35] I will continue to learn a lot from you and I appreciate both the example that you set through your own actions and what you choose to highlight with the platform and the credibility that you have with. Countless people, including CEOs. I really appreciate this time to get a chance to share some of your brilliant insights with the partnering leadership community.

[00:48:01] Thank you so much, Jerry Haluna. 

[00:48:03] Jerry Colonna: Thanks for having me. It was a delight.