***DISCLAIMER: Please note that the following AI-generated transcript may not be 100% accurate and could contain misspellings or errors.***

[00:00:00] Mahan Tavakoli: Carmine Gallo. Welcome to Partnering Leadership. I am thrilled to have you in this conversation with me.

[00:00:04] Carmine Gallo: Oh, thank you.And thank you for inviting me with other esteemed guests that you've had on your podcast. I appreciate it. Good job. Very nice podcast. 

[00:00:15] Mahan Tavakoli: Carmine. I have read your books and loved them from talk like Ted to the story. Teller's Secret Five Stars, secrets of Steve Jobs, and now the Bezos Blueprint. Communication Secrets of the World's Greatest Salesman. So I'm a big Carmine Gallo fan, most especially because communications is crucial to leadership. 

But before we get to that, we'd love to know whereabouts you grew up and how your upbringing impacted the kind of person you've become.

[00:00:48] Carmine Gallo: I love that question. My upbringing and the person I became can trace its origin back to my father. My father, Francesco, was a teenager in Italy when World War II broke out. And so he became a prisoner of war. The enemy took him prisoner, sent him to a prison camp in Africa, and he spent five years of his youth in a prison camp. I don't think he even got the equivalent of a high school education. But after the war, he and my mom, they were married at the time they came to the US, they made a new life for themselves in California, in San Jose. And that's where I grew up.

But the reason why I bring that up is because I still have, even though I'm first generation Italian American, I have an immigrant mentality. So, I am resilient. I have a strong work ethic and a lot of gratitude for what I have and what we've been given. 

So, that tells you a lot about who I am and my values. 

[00:01:53] Mahan Tavakoli: It's wonderful to hear that Carmine, because I definitely relate to that myself. Especially the gratitude that you talk about. 

Now, how is it you started focusing on communication, the importance and the power of it in leadership?

[00:02:10] Carmine Gallo: I think I've always been fascinated by communication in all of its forms. But especially, leaders who can inspire people to take action or motivate or convince people on a superior level, whether that's historical, or contemporary speakers. I've always been fascinated by public speaking and communication.

I became a journalist. I went to UCLA for undergrad, and then I became a journalist. I took a master, got a master's degree from Northwestern, thinking that would be my career. Broadcast journalism. It seemed to satisfy different parts of my personality. Learning something new, communicating, something new to people.

But that was not the field for me. I learned that many years later, and it wasn't exactly what I had in mind. It didn't fulfill the vision of what I thought an international correspondent would be. But eventually, my last full-time reporting job was for CN in New York at a time when I was covering business.

And I began to meet a lot of economists and stock market analysts and CEOs and entrepreneurs, people who I realized could not tell a good story and were terrible communicators. They were very good at what they did, but they were not good at communicating. and articulating their ideas. That's when I began to reframe my life, refocus and use some of the skills that I had learned as a journalist to help entrepreneurs and CEOs tell their stories. 

I started writing books. Now I have my own communication practice where I work with top level CEOs, and I give speeches and keynotes, which is a big part of my career. So writing and speaking.

[00:04:08] Mahan Tavakoli: You do a great job with it. Carmine. First of all, you spend a lot of time researching, which is part of what I appreciate in reading your books. It's not just Carmine's experience. You add your own element and twist to it, but you do a lot of research.

The other thing you mentioned though, you mentioned the challenge you saw with many of the leaders telling stories. I see that on an ongoing basis, so I interact with a lot of leaders, especially here in the Greater Washington, DC region, where they struggle with telling their story or stories for their organization. 

Why is it even important before we get to how they should do it? 

[00:04:54] Carmine Gallo: As humans, we are wired for story. So I've spoken to Anthropologists, who talk about when our ancestors were in caves and tribes and how they sat around campfires telling stories to one another, and those stories informed the rest of the tribe.

They educated, they inspired and that's how we became explorers. We became adventure seekers cuz we heard these great adventures and stories and we wanted to be a part of that journey. So the human brain is and evolved as storytelling. We are a storytelling species.

So what happens when we open PowerPoint? It's the oddest thing stories go out the window and it's just text and bullet points, no stories. And yet that's the way we consume information. It's the way we process the world through story and narrative. Endlessly fascinating because almost everything falls under narrative in one way or another, especially the issues of our time.

And people buy into narratives. So you actually hear that a lot, especially in the media these days. It's a narrative. Why do they call a narrative? Because it's a story and we're all storytellers in one way or another. When I wrote a book called The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs, which I know you read one of my first communication books. I don't believe I'd have to look at it again, but I don't believe I used the word storyteller to reflect who Steve Jobs was. 

I don't think I described him as a storyteller because was hyperfocused on giving a better presentation. Years later, Tony Fidel, who created the first iPod and worked side by side with Steve Jobs, said the most valuable lesson he learned from Jobs was storytelling. So looking back, I realized that's what he was doing. That's why he was such a charismatic and engaging speaker. He wasn't a presenter, he was a storyteller first, the slides simply compliment the story, but you've gotta be a storyteller.

[00:07:03] Mahan Tavakoli: And one of the things that is important is sometimes people see that storytelling as only being of value in marketing or presenting the organization to the external. World. Yesterday I was meeting with a C E O, who I'm working with him and his executive team. He was resisting the idea of stories in the message that he's going to be sharing with the organization because he said, you know what?

What I want is just the facts, just the data. I don't like it when people tell me stories. Part of what we had to talk about is the value of that storytelling to bring the people inside the organization along.

[00:07:45] Carmine Gallo: That's exactly it. As the CEO and as a leader in any organization, you have a very different role, and that role is to bring people along on your journey, to paint a vision and to rally people around that vision and the vehicle through which we can motivate and inspire. 

The best rhetorical vehicle we have is story. So let me tell you a quick story or an example about storytelling. I was interviewing a venture capitalist. He was the president of Y Combinator. I live in Silicon Valley. Y Combinator is a very well known seed accelerator. You would not have Airbnb if it hadn't been for Y Combinator, also Reddit, Dropbox, and a lot of other companies that they funded. 

So I was speaking to the president of Y Combinator at the time. And we were talking about soft skills, like public speaking. I call them soft skills. Okay? I'm the guy who wrote a book on storytelling and I used it, and I said, oh, yeah, I'm sorry, but I think we need to talk about soft skills now. Not just entrepreneurship, but soft skills like storytelling.

And he stopped me. He stopped me. His name is Jeff. He stopped me In my tracks and true story, I think it's still on YouTube. And he looked at me and he said, Soft, if you're an entrepreneur and you approach me, you want me to be a part of your journey, to be a part of the story. If you can't communicate that in a way that inspires me and engages me through story, then you're not gonna get funded.

And if you're not funded, nothing's gonna happen. And then he looked at me and he goes, so Carmine you might call storytelling a soft skill. I call it fundamental.  I think you could see my jaw drop. My whole body language. I was deflated. I'm the guy who writes on storytelling. So don't use the word soft. It is not a soft skill. The hard evidence proves that storytelling and communication are fundamental to aligning teams, persuading people to take action on your idea.

[00:10:03] Mahan Tavakoli: They are. And what I love about both your books and what you keep repeating, whether it was about Steve Jobs and we will get to Jeff Bezos, is that it is a skill that can be developed.

One of the frustrations is sometimes leaders believe, some people have the capabilities and they say, oh yes, Steve Jobs, told great stories, not understanding that it's a skill like any other skill and can be worked on and developed.

[00:10:35] Carmine Gallo: It's a pet peeve of mine at this point. Mahan, don't tell me that you can't do it. Don't tell me. I do not want to hear it. That. Oh, I'm not a good communicator. I'm not a good public speaker. Oh, I'm not Steve Jobs, because neither was I. Neither was he in the book on Jeff Bezos. I have these diagrams, these examples of both Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos very early in their careers at their companies, Apple and Amazon.

They were not considered excellent communicators by any means. In fact, they looked and sounded pretty uncomfortable, but they both develop into much better speakers. Steve Jobs known for being more charismatic on stage. He was not like that 20 years earlier, and Jeff Bezos became an even better writer. I analyzed 50,000 words across two decades of shareholder letters that Bezos wrote as Amazon CEO.

He became a better writer, and that was intentional because both of. Leaders understood that public speaking communication in all of its forms, whether it's presenting or writing, is a skill. And like any skill you can improve. So I have seen some clients who I've worked with personally go from being terrified public speakers. and you'd be surprised, not you, but your listeners will be surprised at how many senior level leaders are terrified of public speaking. 

So I've seen people go from being completely paralyzed, about public speaking, to being so exceptional that they are role models for the rest of the company. I even talked to a preacher once, a famous preacher, this was several years ago, who. For years would not take the pulpit because he was afraid of public speaking or being in public settings. And so he worked behind the scenes today. 

He literally rocks stadiums and he will fill stadiums of 50,000 people sold out. I speak to a lot of people. My needs would be shaking if I had to hold an audience's attention in a stadium for an hour. How do you make that transition? How do you make that transformation? 

That's what's always fascinated me.

[00:13:00] Mahan Tavakoli: And it's really important to recognize the power of those communication skills and the importance in leadership. As I mentioned to you, I spent 25 years of my career with Dale Carnegie training, and we took a lot of pride in the fact that Warren Buffet, even 60 Minutes, when they went to his office, doesn't have his college diploma, or anything else in his office. 

He has his Carnegie course certificate because he to this day says, learning how to communicate, which he did that deal. Carnegie program was the most impactful thing in his life. So this is both something that can be developed and from a leadership perspective, especially now leading through greater uncertainty critical for leaders to master that skill and that ability.

[00:13:53] Carmine Gallo: And the ability to not only story tell to align teams, but to simplify, We are cross-functional now. Scientists are talking to laypeople. Laypeople have to talk to scientists and engineers. 

We're across countries, across cultures. We're doing more remotely than ever before. Indra Nui, the former CEO of PepsiCo biography, I have behind me is a fan, really a real evangelist for simplifying information. She says it quite often in her interviews and her biography, her ability to take complex material and to simplify it. And to communicate it in a way that's clear and simple was she set a foundational skill, a hip pocket skill is what you called it, that fueled her rise through PepsiCo.

So this idea of public speaking, communication, storytelling, they all fall under the same category. And the reason why we talk about storytelling really comes down to simplifying, to help people understand through a short story. A more complex idea. So by telling that story about  Warren Buffet, having the Dale Carnegie certificate, one story that you could tell in 30 seconds. 

Replaces books of public speaking and communication and psychology as to why that's so important. Think about stories as shortcuts, too. Shortcuts to education. I don't need to read anything else. If that's all you do is tell me. Warren Buffett only has one degree. One certificate on his wall in his office, and that's public speaking. He says it's the most important skill that's all I need to know. 

I'm good. You got me . You won me over. I better learn. it.

[00:15:42] Mahan Tavakoli: That is the power of storytelling. So you have spent a big part of your career focused on effective communications of different means. Why this time look to study Jeff Bezos? 

[00:15:57] Carmine Gallo: This story I call it, the Bezos Blueprint because it's a metaphor. It's a metaphor for designing a structure and allowing people a blueprint is something that a whole team has to be a part of. And it's AVA vision, it's an architect's vision. It's a contractor.

They all put together a blueprint so that everybody can adopt it and. A greater structure. So I thought Blueprint was a good metaphor. What Jeff Bezos pioneered at Amazon. Why am I fascinated by Bezos? Because it's a great story. It's a good story. It has characters and hurdles, challenges and peaks and valleys. It's a great story, but people don't, regardless of their opinion, everyone has an opinion on someone who's well known, or a company that touches all of our lives in some way or another.

Regardless, if you think about the story, a man who had a bold idea, an idea that at the time nobody thought could be done. His boss tried to talk him out of it, and he didn't even have a name for his company. He called a cadabra, thinking it was like magic Abra cadabra. True story, he was on a road trip west of Seattle after he had the idea, and he called a lawyer because they were putting together the papers to start the company.

And he said, cadabra. And the lawyer couldn't hear him very well, and he. Cadaver, that's the name of your company. And Bezos realized I'd better change that name pretty quickly. So within months he changed it to Amazon. Why did he change it to Amazon? This is the very beginning of him, of Bezos thinking deliberately about communication.

Why Amazon? Because it's a metaphor. First there's a practical reason. It came first in the phone book. When people use phones, it's interesting. Okay. That was clever, but it's a metaphor. Earth's biggest river. Earth's biggest selection. Even though he was only selling books at the time, he had a bigger vision.

So the fact that he transformed this vision into what I I argue is the world's most impactful company, it's not only one of the most admired brands in the world. It has the most impact on your life. And I can argue that I have the evidence for that. But the point is that he pioneered communication and leadership strategies over more than two decades at Amazon, three decades close to that former Amazonians and former Amazon executives adopted to start their own companies were brought into other organizations. 

One person I know, a very senior executive, adopted one of the strategies that I write about in the book, adopted it from Bezos and brought it to Microsoft and introduced it to Microsoft. So it's very interesting how those who knew Bezos, had very similar observations and experiences with. But it's funny when you talk about it, if you don't mind my saying, because I was just thinking about this. 

When you ask 10 people who do not know Jeff Bezos, if you ask 10 people for an opinion, you will get 10 opinions, 10 very strong opinions that run the gamut. When you ask people who work side by side with Bezos, they say exactly the same thing, almost word for word. They use the same word vision. Demanding excellence. So he always raises the bar and they always end the conversation with the very same observation. 

They say, Carmine, I would not have traded it for anything. That's where I started.  That's where my journalism instincts kicked in. Why do I want to know more about that part? Why wouldn't you? What did you learn and what did you adopt? 

Teach me something that then I can teach other people

[00:20:02] Mahan Tavakoli: Making something happen, that even reflecting back seemed almost impossible. So I had a conversation with David Rubins. Yes. And a couple of nights ago, again, he was mentioning he is very humble.

He has been very successful and made lots of money and giving away his billions. But David Rubenstein was given the opportunity to invest in Amazon early on twice.

[00:20:27] Carmine Gallo: Was he really? I didn't know that story.

[00:20:29] Mahan Tavakoli: Both times. They owned a company that had a catalog of books that Amazon needed. And, Bezos offered the company therefore Carlisle, 25% of Amazon. Wow. At the very beginning in exchange for the catalog. And they rejected it.

Two years later, again, David had gone over to Seattle to see what was going on. And Bezos this time offered him 5% of the company, no longer 25% of the company for them to rip up and throw out the hundred thousand dollars note they had. And David said there's Barnes and Noble and all these other people. Yes. Yeah. There's no way you're going to make it work. and, David, by far being one of the smartest people that Boris I have ever had to interact with.

So meaning Bezos was able to do something and bring people along with him. It's not just done by one individual. Through his vision and through his communication.

[00:21:35] Carmine Gallo: Yeah. Abilities and skills. And I know the fact that Rubenstein, because I read his book several times I was looking behind me. It's not here because it's at. my, it's at my house cuz I reread it all time. He is a huge admirer of Jeff Bezos.

[00:21:49] Mahan Tavakoli: He is. And, he's extremely humble . So he consistently talks about the mistakes has made in investing. So you didn't know any better, you would say David Rubenstein has only lost money during his life. 

Now that's it, you spent a lot of time studying Bezos. Specifically some aspects of communications, including the fact that Bezos. banned PowerPoint. Yes. Why did that, and what did he replace it with? 

[00:22:16] Carmine Gallo: All these beautiful PowerPoints we in companies with. So can you imagine this experience, you're working for Bezos. You're a senior manager in 2004, and you're preparing for the regular Tuesday meeting where you're going to pitch a new idea and Bezos is going to be in the room, and then an email comes out. This really happened. Email comes out the week before and says, no more PowerPoint or PowerPoint will no longer be allowed at what are called STE Meetings

Senior leadership meetings, and. That really happened. Engineers,  people who had an engineering background, senior executives, they immediately got on the phone or they shot an email back saying that this has gotta be a joke. They thought it was a joke, because everything is communicated in PowerPoint. No, it was not a joke because Bezos, he's a reader. He is a voracious reader like Rubenstein.

Voracious reader and he was reading a very long scholarly essay on why PowerPoint is not the best decision making tool. Now, to be clear, I've actually worked with some senior executives at AWS. It is a misnomer to say that it's banned at Amazon. I wrote an article three years ago that was my title. It's not banned throughout Amazon. But it is not accepted at senior level meetings where they're making decisions.

What he replaced it with were what are called six page narratives, the written word. Old-fashioned writing, like we used to do before text and bullet points and slides, and that's what he said in his memo. Jeff Bezos said, I wanna see real sentences, like full sentences with nouns and verbs and paragraphs, because anyone can write bullet points.

It doesn't show that you've really thought it through. An idea from start to finish. So now what they do is they hold what's called a study hall. And I'm not recommending this for everybody, but it's an interesting exercise. They hold study halls. So when you have a new idea to pitch or you have to talk about a new project. You have to write it.

This is just at Amazon, you write it in what's called a six pager. Doesn't have to be six, could be two pages. And at the beginning of the meeting, instead of delivering a PowerPoint, everybody sits around and they read what you wrote. So I think that's an amazing exercise and it's a really good exercise. 

That is a discipline as well. Because it forces you to have much more clarity of thought, much more clarity of thinking. Now, that doesn't mean that PowerPoint is always banned, but it does reflect and remind us that coming back to storytelling, it's the written word first. It's the story first. Show me the narrative.

How does this thing flow logically? PowerPoint, you can use PowerPoint to compliment your story, but that's where I think a lot of leaders get in trouble, and that's why so many PowerPoints are bad or just plain boring because they open PowerPoint and they start with PowerPoint. PowerPoint is not a narrative tool.

It's not a written memo. It's not a storytelling tool. But it can be very creative and effective to compliment your story. I use PowerPoints. I'm giving keynotes. I love showing images and graphics and animations, and maybe an interesting way of looking at a concept, to be more visual, to add some multimedia.

But in no way am I asking people to read the power. That's not  the goal. The story has to come first. So Bezos was a real evangelist for the written word for writing as a fundamental and foundational skill, which it still is today at Amazon. Amazon is a writing culture, and they have writing classes for everyone because it's such an an important. 

[00:26:13] Mahan Tavakoli: Carmine, in trying to understand the application of this for other leaders and organizations, I'd had a conversation with Anne Hyatt, who was the executive partner to Jeff Bezos early on, very early on. John Rossman, the Amazon way series of books mentioned this. 

One of the concerns that I've heard from managers of teams and leaders of organizations and executive teams is they say, okay, that's part of the Amazon culture. 

What elements of that kind of writing can we learn from in order to have better conversations and better meetings ourselves? So in studying it, what do you think are some transferable elements of that writing culture?

[00:27:00] Carmine Gallo: Okay. I think let's get it away from just talking about Amazon. Cuz Amazon, you're right, is a very particular culture. That's why I studied Bezos as a communicator. And what can we learn about effective communication from Bezos?

So first, let's take the 50,000 words in shareholder letters over 20 years. I have a graphic in the book that is just fascinating. Remember I told you he improved over time. What does that mean? Does your writing get better? As Amazon grew larger and more complex, beginning around 2007, his writing got simpler. 

And here's the trick. Use short words to talk about hard things. Short, simple words when you want to get a message across that is urgent or important. Indra Nui talks about that as well. Simplifying complexity means using short. Simple statements, short words talk about big complex events. That means going back to ancient words that are more ancient to the English language before the Norman invasion in 1066. Before romance languages and Latin-based words were introduced into the vocabulary. 

So the other day I was thinking about this every time we want to give an instruction that is very clear. Urgent and to the point intuitively, we go back to those ancient words. So for example, I caught myself the other day, oh, turn out the lights when you leave. Okay? My daughter, turn out the lights when you leave. I thought about it. Turn off the lights when you leave. 

And I looked up each word. Etymology dictionary where you could trace the origins of words. Those are all one syllable words that trace their origin to old English. They're not Latin. So when you want to just get something across and get it across quickly, go to those short words. Health communicators out of DC, everyone knows this. Health communicators take communication classes, wear masks. That's three words, one syllable.

So it's very interesting. There's an entire area of research on this idea of using shorter, simpler words and sentences to explain more complex ideas. That's a very fascinating part, that anyone can learn to be better. But here's the other thing that I think is very important for everyone listening, because I know that many of them are managers or aligned teams. I wrote an entire chapter called, Make the Mission your mantra. 

So here's something that anyone can adopt from Bezos or Amazon from day one, which is a metaphor. That's a whole other area we could talk about. But from day one, Jeff Bezos wanted to align people around a common mission. So in 1997, in his first public shareholder letters, when Amazon was a public company, he started saying that we are obsessed with the customer. 1999. He said, our vision is to become the world's most customer-centric company. 

So you could see two years earlier, he's starting to craft who he wants Amazon to be. Now that may not be your vision. It was important for Amazon back then when no one even knew what the internet was. So you had to be be customer-centric from 1999 to 2021, when Bezos wrote his last shareholder letter, what did he say in his last letter? We are. 

Earth's most customer-centric company. We continue to be and we always will be. And here's what that means. What did he do? He was the repeater in chief. He was the dream keeper. He was the person who kept the mission center stage. If your mission stands for something, then stand up for it. You have to be the one to turn a mission into a mantra, into a repeatable phrase that everyone is going to not only align themselves around and rally around, but they repeat as.

So not too long ago I saw an interview with Andy Jassy, who used to run Amazon Web Services, now the CEO of Amazon, and I lost count of how many times he talked about being a customer-centric company. So even with Bezos not there, they've still internalized the mission, and that's one of the most important chapters, I think, for managers, is to make the mission into a mantra.

You're the one to keep the mission center.

[00:31:59] Mahan Tavakoli: I love that, Carmine because it goes beyond the value of communication for the sake of communication. It truly helps align the organization. Just last week I was facilitating a strategic planning conversation for a group of, senior leaders of. One of the largest organizations in our region, and one of their frustrations was the fact that people in the company saw a lack of communication or didn't necessarily align around things.

I love the term you use, Repeater in Chief. Yes. You have to have those mantras and it's. Whether you get bored with it or not, it has to be repeated over and over again in order to get that alignment throughout the organization. 

[00:32:52] Carmine Gallo: So here's the beauty of what Jeff Bezos did. This is where the genius comes in, and a lot of people don't put this together, which is why I am so happy about the Basils blueprint. He takes a mission, which he communicates consistently and constantly, and repeats it. Repeater in chief. Okay, what else did he do?

He turned the mission into symbols, which is a really advanced leadership skill. Symbols. So instead of just saying We're Earth's most customer-centric company, when you walked into a Bezos meeting, there was an empty chair in the meeting and that empty chair represented the customer. Oh, so now he's, he is not only take, this is what fascinated me about Bezos. So you asked why I wrote about him. 

Very few leaders do this. He took a piece of communication that could be written down or repeated and turned it into a symbol, an empty chair that symbolized the customer, and he would turn to that empty chair and say, what would the customer think of what you just, is that easy for the customer? Is that too complicated for the customer? They're not here to voice their opinions. 

What would they say? How would they feel about your idea and symbolism pervades Amazon, at least under Bezos, the door desks, there's the famous story of the door desks and I did not just take stories at their word, we hear stories. I always wanted to confirm it, so I confirmed it through. Many people, they actually did have door desks. So instead of real desks, Bezos went to Home Depot and they bought doors and they took the knobs out of the doors and they converted them into desks.

Why? Because that represents one of Amazon's leadership philosophies, which is, frugality and to always be thinking as, as startup. and run as efficiently as possible door desks genius symbols. 

[00:34:59] Mahan Tavakoli: It is, those symbols are genius and they will attract and retain some people Yep. And they will definitely have some people, Weed out. So again, a funny part of the story is that David Rubenstein said, I saw this when I'd gone to their office, saw this desk, and it was like, what's going on?

They can't afford to buy., 

[00:35:20] Carmine Gallo: Oh he has a better desk. So he did see it.

[00:35:22] Mahan Tavakoli: He did see that, but of it being that, When you have that clarity of the message and understanding and communicated both through the words and through the symbols, that attracts certain people who know clearly that empty chair and to speak to that empty chair or the frugality of the company, or some people that choose. 

I don't want to be involved with this. I want to be traveling in an aircraft or whatever the case might be. So it has that alignment with values. It doesn't become statements on a wall. Yeah, it's something that people in the organization feel sense talk about and act out.

[00:36:07] Carmine Gallo: Excellent. Hey, you said it better than I even wrote it so you could have ghost written The Bezos blueprint with me just would've been excellent. I should have called you.

[00:36:16] Mahan Tavakoli: Carmine.I love how clearly you put this because I can see the leaders listening into the conversation now asking themselves, how can I do this with my team? So there is a lot of value that comes from what Bezos did with Amazon, but the question is, how can I communicate and align around those values.

How can I find symbols to represent with my team? There's no need to be CEO of the organization just with my team. Now the other thing you mentioned in the Bezos blueprint is the power of metaphors than power of metaphors in leadership, which Bezos is great. 

[00:37:03] Carmine Gallo: Yes. And I'm so glad  you picked up that because that too is an advanced leadership skill. This is not public speaking 1 0 1. This is advanced now you're speaking in metaphors, Metaphorical language. . Oh my. oh my God. This is just delicious, especially for a storyteller like me.

So metaphors, as all of your listeners know, but we won't embarrass anybody. It's a way of educating by taking something that is complex and comparing it to the familiar, it's a type of. Analogies and metaphors are siblings. So for our purpose, we just say it's a comparison. You take an abstract topic and compare it to something familiar.

Jeff Bezos started with day one. Day one is not a thing, and yet if you go to Seattle, you go to the headquarters building. Called day one. It's called Day one Building. Day one a metaphor for always thinking like it's the first day of a startup. Always learning, always improving, always growing. It's a metaphor. There's a very famous metaphor that a lot of people use it now in different organizations called the Flywheel.

A flywheel is a mechanical device, Bezos read a book again, A voracious reader read a book by Jim Collins. Talked to Jim Collins. I think the book was Good to Great, but it could have been another book by Collins. And in it he mentioned this idea, the flywheel effect where the structure around a company moves slowly at first, and then it gets faster and faster.

So, if we're frugal, we have a door desk, we can lower our prices. Lower prices that Amazon attracts more customers attract more customers and more sellers. Pretty soon it acts as a flywheel. It's now called the Amazon flywheel and growth becomes faster and faster. That's a complicated topic. It's even hard to explain, which is why Bezos sketched it.

And you could see the sketch online. He sketched it on a napkin. He said, let's call this the Amazon flywheel. And to this day, Andy Jassy still uses it. People at Amazon still say, that'll add to the flywheel, or that'll create momentum to the flywheel. It's all about the flywheel. And now if you go to organizations, I hear that all the time. Here's our flywheel. I spoke at a company not too long ago and they had a big poster and they said, this is our company's flywheel. I said, oh, that's interesting.

Where'd you get that? Oh, yeah. The flywheel. You've never heard of the Flywheel Karma I said, yeah, I bet you didn't know that Jeff Bezos really, He didn't invent that, but he's credited for making it more popular. So a lot of what startups and a lot of companies use and say to me are things that Bezos created two pizza teams.

You ever heard of a pizza teams? Mahan.

[00:40:00] Mahan Tavakoli: Yeah,

[00:40:01] Carmine Gallo: Absolutely. Two, two feeds of teams. So it is more of a product management, product design type of thing. So I hear a lot about it in Silicon Valley. So when people are working on a particular product or a feature within a product, if your team gets too large, then it becomes weighted down and bureaucratic and inefficient.

And Jeff Bezos realized that. They had to have smaller teams for each project. And someone asked him, how big is the team? How big should the team be? And he said, when we started Amazon, you could feed everybody with two large pizzas. . So I don't know. I don't have an exact number, but how about two pizza teams and that caught on. Do you know how many times I get that repeated back to me when I'm with startups? Hey Carmine. Yeah, we do two pizza teams here, two pizza teams, , they think they created it and I have to be the one to say, actually that's a Bezos thing, but hey, it's okay if you wanna take credit for it, go with it.

[00:40:57] Mahan Tavakoli: What a beautiful way to communicate those metaphors. I find myself using them all the time, whether it's day one over mercenaries. Yeah. And the two pizza teams, you could just as easily say, you should probably have eight to 12 people at most in a team. So much more memorable and impactful to have that metaphor to use for the size of an effective team.

[00:41:26] Carmine Gallo: That takes creativity. You don't, you don't have to copy it from Amazon. The point is that Jeff Bezos was deliberate. He was thinking, how do I best communicate a complex or abstract idea in a way that everybody just instantly gets? That's why Rubenstein and others who have talked about Bezos say he was very creative.

[00:41:49] Mahan Tavakoli: It does, and I wanted,  underline, a point that we mentioned briefly earlier, whether it was with Steve Jobs and, You wrote about him, how he started out as not a very confident and effective communicator and ended up one of the best storytellers and a very good communicator. Or Jeff Bezos. 

Same thing in you studying his letters or David Rubenstein, admits readily himself. He was very uncomfortable talking to people and talking to groups, and now he's a master at it. 

[00:42:25] Carmine Gallo: Yes. All of I've heard him say that. He's constantly learning. He's got that growth mindset. , they all do. 

[00:42:32] Mahan Tavakoli: These are things we can learn and grow as leaders. So I appreciate the Bezos Blueprint, which lays out some of these things that separated his leadership, but how we can adjust and adapt for ourselves and our organizations.

Now, one other thing I wanted to quickly touch on Carmine is we talked about storytelling and had a great article in Inc. On. Storytelling, not oversharing is the secret to building business relationships. Because a lot of the leaders that I interact with sometimes, they're like, I don't know what's appropriate. I want to be my authentic self, what is the appropriate kind of storytelling in a business context?

[00:43:14] Carmine Gallo: I wrote that article because at the time there was a theme or a trend on LinkedIn called oversharing because some CEOs were on LinkedIn being very emotional or crying. And I didn't tackle that part of it because look, if you're being authentic, you're being authentic, that's okay. But don't try to be empathetic.

Have to be a little bit more natural. So I suggested let's do storytelling, not oversharing. Storytelling simply means I am going to choose those stories that are relevant to the topic and maybe stories that resonate with me. They can be personal. They don't have to be. Maybe they're stories that you read about a historical figure or somebody from a book, 

Some CEOs are great at those kinds of stories. David Rubenstein he's a history guy. He brings up all these historical stories. I love listening to Rubenstein. I don't necessarily need to hear him talk about founding Carlisle, although he talks about those personal setbacks and struggles.

Those are very impactful. But he also talks about the people he's interviewed and their stories and case studies. So when it comes to storytelling, I believe that focus on finding those stories that are relevant to your topic that reinforce your topic. And if they're personal, that's fine, but I don't need to know all the skeletons in the closet.

That's okay too. I don't need to know everything about your life, especially if it's not all relevant to the topic at hand. Let me give you one good example of something that is emotional, is deeply emotional. It was appropriate. . I was working with a senior executive at, I guess I could say it. She's no longer there. She's moved on and it was at Walmart. I was trying to get her to be more of a storyteller too.

And then she said at Walmart, our slogan really means something, save money, live better, save money, live better. Oh, okay. To me, that's just a tagline. I see it on their sign, doesn't mean anything. What does it mean to you? So you have to ask yourself questions, or ask questions of your clients to solicit or to elicit the best stories.

Tell me more. What did it mean to you? And she told me a deeply emotional story. Everybody in the room in tears, about how before she joined Walmart, there was someone in her family who had a very serious health problem and at the time they could buy the very same items that this person needed, at Walmart and save $300 a month and that $300 a month with that savings, they could buy X, Y, and Z. 

And at the end it was a really heartwarming story. So that was a personal story, but it was also a story that was relevant to her job at Walmart. And so when she started to become a speaker,  to onboard new employees and new executives, she would tell that story. Because I think I just gave her permission to tell a personal story. It's okay. It doesn't reflect badly on you.  It reflects your humanity. But more than that, it paints the company in a completely different light.

You know what her biggest problem was? After started sharing her story publicly at. She did have a problem. She emailed me a few months later. She said, I got a big problem. I don't wanna say no to everybody who wants to have lunch with me now. Yeah. They wanted her be their mentor, and, especially the newcomers, the new folks. She, Carmen, I, how doI handle this? And I laughed and she said no, I'm serious. There's so many people who wanna have lunch with me now. But it's a way of connecting. 

It's personal. It's a way of connecting, but it is also relevant to the topicand it reframes the topic in a different way. So that's why you have to be very deliberate about the stories you choose.You don't have to overshare to be a storyteller. Not an overshare. overshare. Is that a word? It isn't. Overshare.

[00:47:25] Mahan Tavakoli: If it isn't, it should be. We'll make sure to add it to the word list. But, tying this back to the writing that you emphasized a lot, and I know studied quite a bit before writing the Bezos blueprint, is that I. Whether it is for my own thinking or for the executives that I work with for their thinking before presenting, before coming up with the stories.

A lot of times writing helps clarify my thinking, so writing can be of real value to make the storytelling, storytelling that is purposeful rather than meaningless overs sharing.

[00:48:06] Carmine Gallo: If you're going to tell a story about a manager or a leader, yes, please write it down first. Be your own critic, your own editor. Nobody wants to hear you tell a story for five minutes.

They're not even sure where it's leading. Condense those stories. Edit, write those stories more an active language, subject, verb, object. When we speak, we tend to ramble. I do. I'm distracted. I have a little ADSD, right? So I go onto different tangents. I'm rambling. I'll speak in a passive language. . I'm thinking, I'm already thinking too fast from my mouth as we speak.

So if I know that I'm going to deliver a particular story that I wanna make impactful and relevant, yes, write it down first. That's okay. That's a good exercise to do. And when you do a PowerPoint, The presentation notes. Put exactly what you wanna say in your presentation notes. Go through those notes, cut them down. Edit,  edit. That's another thing I learned from Bezos and other good communicators.

They are really good editors. They're the ones who cut out all the superfluous things in their writing and in their presentations that they don't need writing. And then presentations become. More condensed, more clear, and there's power in condensing your stories. 

[00:49:33] Mahan Tavakoli: There really is. And I had a conversation with Park Howell who does the business of Story podcast and has written a couple of books on stories. And uses. The example of, president Lincoln and his Gettysburg address, and the person that spoke before him, , spoke for a couple of hours. was supposedly a great orator, but President Lincolns was condensed to the point and therefore much more impactful.

So I really appreciate you having shared so many thoughts on how our communication can be more impactful, whether verbal communication, written communication, and the thinking that it takes for both of those. 

Now, Carmine, in addition to your books, are there any other leadership resources or practices you typically find yourself recommending for leaders as they want to become more effective, impactful communicators?

[00:50:24] Carmine Gallo: Yeah. Take Rubenstein's advice. Read. Read more than average. Read more than your peers. A lot more Rubenstein reads a a hundred a year. Jeff Bezos,  had a leadership book club at Amazon. Many of  the strategies and even products that we know from Amazon came directly from books. We talked about the flywheel earlier that fueled Amazon's growth.

It was a transformative concept, came from a book by Jim Collins that Bezos. Because Bezos reads more. Than most people who he was surrounded by. And Anne Hyatt, who you've interviewed, I believe, picked up on that and she began to realize that, boy,  my boss reads a lot.

And so she would go to his desk, take some of the stuff that he was reading during lunchtime, she would read it so she noticed it too. But you can look at almost any successful leader, they read more than average.  That makes them more interesting communicators, that's my takeaway. They're more interesting because they have more stories to pull from,they have more concepts to put together. It just makes them more interesting and engaging to listen to.

[00:51:48] Mahan Tavakoli: What great advice. I totally agree with you on. Whether it is the people you mentioned, I know David Rubenstein,  reads way more than a hundred books a year, and, so does Warren Buffett, so does Bill Gates. Yeah.  And part of the point is if you talk to any of these folks, they did it from before they were successful or rich.

So David Rubenstein. His elementary school could check out only 12 books at a time from the library. So he would check out 12 books.And read all those 12 books. So that is a contributor to success. It's not looking at David Rubenstein or Jeff Bezos and saying, oh, they're successful. So of course they have the time to read.

They made me read, So I appreciate that Carmine most, especially because you have outstanding books of yours that I think everyone in the audience should read, including the Bezos Blueprint. So how can the audience find out more about your books and you Carmine?

[00:52:50] Carmine Gallo: They can certainly go to carmine gallo.com. That is a repository for everything where you can get links to all of the books.  There's different landing pages on each of my books plus videos. As long as you remember a good Italian name like Carmine Gallo, you can find me, but carmine gallo.com is. The place to start. But you can find me on YouTube. I have a YouTube channel. I am very active on LinkedIn, and on Twitter, again, Carmine gallo. So carmine gallo.com, sign up for my newsletter, and stay in touch with me.

That's a good way of staying in touch with me actually, cuz you get all my new information every week. And if you email it back, I'll do it.

[00:53:30] Mahan Tavakoli: You, in my view, are the leading thinker at this point on this art and skill of communication, which I believe is critical, both leading through greater uncertainty and in leading as there will be transformational changes because of technology. All around us.

So I really appreciate you taking the time to share some of your insights and thoughts on the Bezos blueprints, communication Secrets of the World's Greatest Salesman and More Communications Thoughts, Carmine Gallo.

[00:54:03] Carmine Gallo: Thank you. Thank you for your kind words. I appreciate it.