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Hey there folks, welcome to today's episode of the Strategy and Leadership Podcast.
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My name is Anthony Taylor.
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I'm so excited to share with you my guest today.
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You know, one of the things you're thinking about, longevity in an organization, starting, growing, moving into the CEO, which is our guest distinction, growing the company's revenue 40 times, which to the size and scale that it is, you'll be like, oh, it's not like 40 bucks, it's quite a bit.
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Having the impact that he has had in multiple organizations outside of his day job, and now,
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you know, stewarding the organization to have impact around the world.
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I'm just so grateful to be joined by Lawrence Armstrong, who is the chairman and former CEO of Where Malcolm.
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Lawrence, how are you today?
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I'm doing great.
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Thank you, Anthony.
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Appreciate you having me on.
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Like I said, it's a privilege.
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I'm so excited.
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For folks who don't know about Where Malcolm, about you and your work, can you give us a little bio?
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Sure.
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Well, Where Malcolm is a
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international design architecture, interior design and engineering firm.
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And we're based in Irvine, California.
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And we have 30 offices all across North America and have done a lot of international work as well.
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But our clients are the Fortune 500, local and regional corporations, and the commercial development industry as a whole, commercial real estate industry.
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Excellent.
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And then you started with the firm 1988, 1984, something like that.
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1984.
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I was hired by our founders, Bill Ware and Bill Malcolm as a, uh, a designer and architect.
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And, um,
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Yeah, so I've been with the firm over 42 years at this point.
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Okay, so obviously there's a big story there going from employee into principal and now where you're at now, looking at the stages of growth and there's a lot to talk about there.
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You literally wrote a book about a layered leadership in terms of your experience.
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But can you take us back to some of those early stages as the company grew in its evolution and your experience stepping into
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that leadership role?
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Sure.
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So, when I joined the firm, we were one office and about 30 people in Irvine, California.
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And I guess it was the year after I joined that
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You know, our, our founders had been asked by our clients to open a couple other offices, which, you know, we had never done before.
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And so we opened a San Diego office and an office up in LA.
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So both nearby, but you know, both over an hour away from our main office.
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And so I was given the opportunity, I was very young.
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to go and run our LA office at the time.
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And so that was late 1985.
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And it was the beginning of sort of a big eye-opening journey into leadership.
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You know, I was an architect and all of a sudden I was a, a,
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a leader of an office, trying to build an office and trying to figure that out.
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And so that was an eye-opening experience and a great opportunity for me and taught me a lot, obviously.
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And so I ran and built that office for several years.
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and then the founders decided they wanted to retire from the business and offered to sell the company to myself and my business partner at the time who became my business partner Jim Williams who was running our San Diego office.
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So in 1992 we bought the company
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And, which, you know, didn't know how to do that either.
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But we did it and went through a whole series of agreements.
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And, you know, we were in a real estate recession at the time.
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So we were buying the business and navigating a recession at the same time.
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And we both moved back to the Irvine headquarters and took over the company in 1992.
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From 1992 on, I was the CEO for 28 years and then transitioned to chairman whenever that was, six or seven years ago.
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Yeah.
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And in the meantime, we built the company from where it was and to where it is now.
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And for those that don't know, you know, a little bit about the company, you know, where it is now, how many offices, how many employees?
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Yeah, so 30 offices and I think just under a thousand employees at this point.
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And we are in 1992, we billed a little over three million dollars.
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And when I turned over the reins, you know, as
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CEO, we built we were billing 139 million and as chairman.
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This year we'll have a record year and it will be above $240 million in revenue.
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That's incredible.
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Yeah, it's been a really great ride.
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Well, congratulations to those involved.
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Obviously, the numbers are one thing, the impact is the other.
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And you can see bits of where Malcolm, everywhere you go, if you know what to look for.
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What's interesting is you're an architect, right?
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You're an artist also, and I want to talk about that a little bit.
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And I'll give kind of two pathways.
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You know, one is how do you think about leadership?
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How, you know, recognizing that it wasn't necessarily the pathway and then two, if you want to weave it in there, are there parallels between art, if you're watching this, there's guitars in the background, there's literally paintings that, you know, wrote a book.
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Are there parallels between how you view art and how you view leadership?
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And I'll let you take that question however you want to take it.
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Yeah, so, well, you know,
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I've said it many times, you know, you go to school for one thing and you learn how to do it.
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And if you're good at it, I guess, or accomplished, you get promoted.
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And all of a sudden you're basically managing and leading people.
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And, you know, that happens almost no matter what business you're in, I guess.
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So that's what it was for me.
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And so I had a steep learning curve early on figuring out how to properly lead and, and,
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and inspire people and strategize the growth of the company.
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Um, so yeah, I, I think that I guess because, uh, we're architects and, um,
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You know, architecture is what I like to call a whole brain business.
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You use both sides of your brain all the time, every day.
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And it sets you up well, I think, to be creative and build both on your strengths, but also on your weaknesses a little bit.
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Or, you know, be able to learn in areas where maybe you didn't have training.
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In my case, you know, managing and leadership and business, right?
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So I see it as a really interwoven thing and the very layered thing, which is kind of why
that kind of evolved into my philosophy for leadership, which is called layered leadership and whole brain thinking.
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And so, you know, throughout the book, I give examples of very creative strategies we use to either diversify the company, to, you know, make it stronger.
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in downturns and recessions, and to diversify us geographically and by product type, and then to inspire a whole group of people to become leaders, you know, we've,
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I sort of call our company a leadership academy because we develop leaders, because we need a lot of leaders to run all these offices and these business units that are all over North America.
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And so there's a lot of artistic and creative thought that goes into that process.
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It's not purely an analytical kind of a,
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exercise for us.
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And so I've used all sorts of metaphors and different influences as examples to build our strategies and leadership within our company.
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And so, and I can talk about some of the specifics if you want, but I think, you know, sort of that's the basis of the idea.
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And then as far as the art goes,
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You know, I'm also an artist.
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I've always been an artist, but I developed, I started to develop sort of, it is a second career, so to speak, as I was planning my exit from Where Malcolm, just so, you know, I'd have something to do, I guess.
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But what I discovered was, you know, being an artist, you have no limits.
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You can do whatever you want, right?
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And that's the cool thing about being an artist,
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And the creativity, I think, inspires strategy, you know, at least in my case, I think, and vice versa.
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So I've used a lot of the concepts of layers and I've explored in my art this idea conceptually of layers.
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And I've then applied it and shown people how that applies to building a business and building leadership.
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And so it seems a little bit abstract, and it is, but I've tried to bring some specific examples to bear to prove that out.
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I mean, I love it.
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Well, I think what's interesting about things that are abstract is they could occur as abstract.
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Unless you know what you're looking at, and then it's actually very intentional.
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So, you know, a couple things that I want to highlight what I heard.
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You know, as you thought about stepping into your role, inspiration, strategy, and leading.
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And those are distinct, right?
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It's how do you support the growth of the organization.
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if you think of creating the sustainability and making something like art that is timeless, is creating those levels of differentiation, the resilience, and the sustainability.
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When I think about a value proposition, there's multiple layers to it to make it incomparable to something else.
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It stands in a league in its own, which is really what you've built where Malcolm to be.
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And then just in terms of creativity and how you've done well using your whole brain is,
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you have to be whole brain to be a successful entrepreneur and you can't be afraid to fail and those that are successful have the creativity because there is no right it's just how are you done it and so you've been able to put that in place and i find it really neat that you know those kind of three structures together while seemingly abstract you know come together to make something really cool that has built the foundations of your success at least that's how i hear it and see it thoughts on that yeah no absolutely i think that
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You know, a couple of things that I learned along the way that ended up being, you know, sort of foundational to the, you know, to the growth and the strategy is, well, first of all, number one, we are great at what we do, which is what inspired our clients to ask us to go.
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other places which we're experts in commercial real estate.
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We understand our client's business.
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We understand how to design buildings that sustain over the course of time and are you can evolve with the marketplace.
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remain relevant years after we designed the building.
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And so clients value that, right?
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And so that was sort of one.
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And so in that resulted in us being asked to go to other markets where maybe that expertise in the design industry didn't exist.
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And so that's been a great thing.
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The second one was,
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You know, we were given this amazing opportunity to take over, lead by this company and lead it.
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And we didn't want to just, you know, take the company and keep it where it was, which was in a good spot.
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We were a really strong, good Southern California architectural firm.
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It's basically what we were specializing in commercial real estate.
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But it, the inspiration
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it was so inspiring to be given this opportunity that we wanted to create as many opportunities for our people to grow in their careers as we possibly could so when you marry this idea that you know we've defined what we're great at better than anybody and our clients are asking us to go places to open new offices and serve them in other markets and then we
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take our existing talent pool and continue to build it to inspire people and give them opportunity to go out and run these offices and build departments within these offices and grow a whole bunch of leaders that end up building our business.
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So that whole thing works together as sort of a foundational strategy for the firm.
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And like I said, over time, I've relied on some metaphors and some different, you know, business books and certain leaders throughout history.
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My biggest influence is Leonardo da Vinci.
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the ultimate whole brain thinker.
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And so these are the kind of things that we think about as we build the company.
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Cool, I love that.
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I was trying to see, like from the commercial landscape place that you're creating spaces while they're commercial, they're people to live and
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be part of and so like the intentionality of a good commercial space is critical and so you need to be able to be good at that.
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But what it sounds like really like one of the foundations of where Malcolm is you're good at developing people.
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And watch you said didn't say good, you said great.
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And so great at developing people.
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Where did you have the idea for the leadership Academy?
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At what point did you say, actually, you know what, we're in the building business, but we're really in the people business.
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At what point did that turn for you?
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And how did that shape the leadership decisions you made with hiring and developing leaders?
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Yeah.
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So it's definitely foundational and, and really I talk about a very, you know,
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We all read business books and, you know, et cetera.
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And we, early on, decided we were gonna become students of business and not just look at inside our industry at what other design firms were doing, but, you know, other great businesses.
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And so we read a lot of business books.
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And the one,
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where that came from i guess uh is is the example of jack welch built at ge he um he wrote a great book and he was called straight from the gut and um it's you know what he did is he built a leadership academy at ge where he trained his leaders um in you know in business and you know so many of the leaders got promoted and ran businesses under his leadership
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but then also went on to be CEOs of other giant corporations in America.
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And so we took a lot of inspiration from that concept.
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And so the way it manifested is, you know, we just, I started having leadership meetings in our company over 30 years ago.
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And we've had them three times a year ever since.
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And they used to be six people and now they're over 100 people.
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And, um,
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where we talk about these ideas and make sure that we're all on the same page and, you know, talking about strategies and implementing the same ideas across the entire platform.
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So our clients can experience consistency in service and high quality in design services.
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And so that's kind of how we did it.
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And then since then we've added on and added on and added on to the, you know, to the people development side of our company.
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We have a very strong, um, formal mentoring, uh, in coaching program.
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We have, um, business meetings with every business, uh, uh, unit in the company.
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Um, you know, every month or every other month to review how they're doing and with operations and the business side and, you know,
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and all of that sort of thing.
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And then we're very integrated as a company.
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We're not, we have 30 offices, but they're not standalone.
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They're very well integrated to central services that we provide for the entire company.
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And they help each other out.
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We back each other up at all times.
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And so that becomes the entire culture of the company.
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And so we built this idea over a long period of time with programs like that.
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I mean, for those of you that follow SME strategy, you know, we're big on alignment.
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We're big on asking questions, the Socratic method.
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And, you know, the root of that, in which I think you've incorporated, Lawrence, is, you know, Soccer Keys in Greece would get these forums
together, or Agora's where people would, like, talk through things and sharing of that information.
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And what I hear, Lawrence, through that is that it's like a decentralized model without using, you know, tech terms.
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It's just, hey, we have 100 people that we can get into a room to share ideas, share best practices, you know, not just about design, but obviously about design so you can be on the cutting edge.
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but about business, about leadership, about people.
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I'm sure there's a human centered part of it.
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And at the heart of your organization, it really sounds like the human experience is critical to it, which is sounding like where you're at right now as an artist.
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You know, it's just you're incorporating that into your life.
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It's not about business, it's about
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really helping human beings be successful and then the kind of inspired by ge jack welsh is how do we get people to be successful everywhere they go not just in our organization is that fair yeah 100 100 you know because you know we're big believers in and i'm a big i you know i've got it in the book like
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We counsel our people on staying healthy and staying balanced in their lives financially as well.
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So we talk about those things as well because we want the person to be successful in all aspects of their life, not just at work.
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Work's important, but if you're failing in other aspects of your life, you're probably not going to be successful in business either.
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So we care about our people very much.
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and we've tried to extol that through all of this uh all of our sort of strategies and policies because you can't get there without the right people and um and so it's it's you know it's really important you know people come to me and you know uh or our leaders and say you know how do i get promoted i want to you know i want to grow in my career and the answer is always
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The company needs you to be promoted and the company needs you to be growing your career.
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So here's what we want you to do.
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Here's what you can work on because we need you to get there.
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Well, it's about creating that space.
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So you as the listener, use this podcast.
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Have a conversation with your managers.
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Get them to, I won't just say subscribe to the podcast.
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Of course, please do.
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But the reason
we design these conversations is to have it as a focal point of conversations you can have in your leadership with your teams.
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And say, hey, what did you learn from this?
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What did you take away from this?
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You know, you don't have to do the heavy lifting, but as a leader you have to act first and create the convening.
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Okay, Lawrence, as we finish up our conversation now, what is inspiring you now?
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I know you do a lot of nonprofit work, a lot of mission-based work, you're on a lot of boards.
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You know, what are you seeing, hey, what is inspiring you now to continue to do the work that you're doing, but what are you seeing with the organizations that you're supporting as what they need to do to step into their leadership moving forward?
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Yeah, so I'm involved on some boards.
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I'll give you one example.
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I've been involved in a lot of stuff, so I'll just pick one.
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Orange County United Way, I've been on the board now for several years, and I helped them create and I chaired their initiative, a project.
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that's called United to End Homelessness here in Orange County.
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And so we made tremendous progress.
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We started it from scratch.
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We've housed now over 1,300 people and, uh, and been a sort of a catalyst within the community to bring other organizations together to be more effective collectively at, you know, homelessness.
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So now I chair the board, um,
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at Orange County United Way.
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And it's a really inspiring organization that does great work in the community.
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Very effective work.
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They're very entrepreneurial about it actually, as opposed to most nonprofits.
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They measure everything they do and make sure they're being effective and efficient with the
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the the support the financial support they get either through grants or philanthropy so that they can report back out it's like thank you for what you how you've helped us and here's what we did with it which is very impressive and really leading from a national perspective in orange county here so i'm inspired and excited about the the work we're doing here in orange county in that way and yeah
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So that's one example, I guess.
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I've got a couple other ones, but that's a good one.
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No, I love it.
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I think it's really critical in these times for mission-based organization.
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Again, I say this all the time.
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I believe for-profits should act more like nonprofits.
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I think nonprofits should act more like for-profits.
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And being able to measure your impact, communicate it with stakeholders, is really just a galvanizing tool to align stakeholders and really get the focus and impact that you need.
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And as you've mentioned, they're doing great work there.
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Kudos to you there.
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Kudos to all of the organizations.
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Like you said, there are many.
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And also thanks for being here and writing the book.
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Where can people connect with you?
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Where can they learn more about Where Malcolm?
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And where can they get your book?
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Thank you.
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Well, so I have a website for me, and it has the book and the art and some of the leadership stuff on it, lawrencerarmstrong.com.
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And there's links to the book on there too.
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The book has a separate website, layeredleadershipbook.com, but it's on Amazon and everywhere else.
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You know, you can find the book very easily.
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And then of course my company, Where Malcolm is wheremalcolm.com.
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And you'll find us there and all the work we're doing all over North America and all over the world.
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So we're excited about that.
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Excellent.
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I wish you and your team nothing but success.
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And folks, you know, if you look on their, like, buildings page, it seemingly goes on forever.
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So you've likely been in one of their buildings, whether Canada, Europe, Mexico, or really anywhere else.
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And I just invite you to just be aware of your surroundings.
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Hopefully it inspires you to just, hey, have a great life, be a great leader, and I hope you enjoyed today's episode.
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And once again, thank you, Lawrence, for joining us today.
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We just appreciate your time and your energy and your focus and everything that you do for the world.
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So thank you.
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Awesome.
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Thank you, Anthony.
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Appreciate that.
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Cheers.
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Folks, my guest today, Lawrence Armstrong, you know, really taking in as a leader, especially one that's been able to grow an amazing organization, is looking at what do you need to do to support people, like creating that leadership academy, creating spaces for them to be successful.
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I just love what he said.
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He says, like, we need you to be successful.
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Hey, coming to me, hey, I need you to be able to grow into the organization.
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Are you creating the pathway for your people to be successful?
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Are you putting the structures in place for them to win?
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And then, you know, whatever business you're in, it is, of course, the people business, not just the business business.
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And the last thing is, you know, bring your whole brain, your whole self to your work.
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You'll get more out of it.
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You'll get a better product, and hopefully you'll enjoy it more.
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And part of that is, you know, feeding your brain with good stuff.
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So I hope you enjoyed today's episode.
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Be sure to subscribe.
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We publish weekly and interview a great guest just like Lawrence and who get expertise from around the world.
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share with your team, have conversations about it.
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And as always, if you want to have a conversation about strategy and leadership with your organization, SME Strategy facilitates strategy offsites.
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That's our work.
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But in the meantime, we just help bring leadership perspectives like this to you through our podcast.
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So share with somebody you love.
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I appreciate you.
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I love you.
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Thanks for listening.
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Thanks for being here.
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As always, until next time, we'll see you soon.