Master The Art Of Alignment For Unlimited Business Success With Strategic Coach® And EOS®

Shannon Waller: Hi, Shannon Waller here, and welcome to Inside Strategic Coach with Dan Sullivan.
 
Dan Sullivan: Shannon, it's a great pleasure today because we have Kelly Knight and Mark O'Donnell as our guests. And a lot of Coach clients may not know, but EOS and Strategic Coach are like cousins who really like each other. And this all started with Gino Wickman, founder of EOS, starting Coach, I think it was 25 years now, 25 years in the Program. And I noticed right from the beginning that Gino kept asking me, are you guys ever going to extend the Program that you have for the entrepreneurs and the entrepreneur's immediate support team, are you going to extend it out to the whole organization? And I said, not if I have anything to do with it. So I just noticed that there was a series of discussions, and this went on for about seven years before I knew what he was up to, and he was fashioning out what the rest of an entrepreneur's organization would look like. And so I've spoken at EOS events that Gino hosted, and I've been invited to the quarterly big meetings for the EOS implementers. And I got more and more interested, and there was just a natural point where we said, you know, we're on parallel tracks here into the future. And it seems to me that we're really focusing on collaboration right now with other entrepreneurial organizations whose value creation would fit in perfectly with Strategic Coach clients. And that's when it happened. And then a couple of years after that, Gino decided to reduce his involvement in EOS, and two other people who I knew very well, Kelly and Mark, appeared on the scene, and they had become the leadership for EOS. And the question I'd like to ask, I'll start with Mark first, and then I'll go to Kelly, Mark, what was your introduction to EOS?
 
Mark O'Donnell: So my introduction to EOS was in a very strange place and that was having lunch with a three-star general at the Pentagon. It's a true story. I was running a vertically integrated pharma biotech services business and we had about nine companies and we were succeeding in spite of ourselves. And I was introduced to an EOS implementer, Jonathan Smith. And he's like, hey, you should read Traction. He called my business partner later. So I read the book and I was like, hey, this is some good stuff. This is going to help me run a better business. It's going to help me grow, be more organized, reduce my workload. And at the same time, I joined Strategic Coach pretty much the same couple months that I was introduced to EOS and started self-implementing in my companies, and then I hired Jonathan to work with the rest of them, and the rest is history.
 
Shannon Waller: Kelly?
 
Kelly Knight: Well, and for me, my journey was very different. Most members of our community as EOS implementers or those who hire an EOS implementer have had in some way, shape, or form either read Traction or been to a talk or workshop or something. Not so for me. My introduction to EOS, I was actually on narcotics, having come back from Vancouver from an accident where my shoulder was dislodged. And I got a call from the recruiter seeking to fill the seat of the EOS integrator at EOS Worldwide. And so I can't imagine what I said. I don't recall what I said, but that was my introduction was through the recruiter having nothing to do with EOS. And about four conversations later, I met Gino Wickman. From there, I just fell in love with everything that EOS represents in the world. And somehow out of roughly 2,500 candidates, I became the integrator. So it's just been the most incredible journey past nine years.
 
Shannon Waller: Kelly, was the role of integrator well-structured by that time going out to the rest of the implementers?
 
Kelly Knight: It was, it's a far more well known today, the integrator, what that role is of second in command or COO. There's lots of different names for that out in the world. But at the time, I was really the succession plan to Don Tinney, who was Gino Wickman's business partner and co-founder. So what Don had done in the early stages was really different than what they were needing for EOS Worldwide at the time. I came in to scale the organization to create that growth path for the implementer community, for the growth of books, and for the growth of the web-based platform, because it's really that three legs of the stool that we talk about. And so while it was established, it was really kind of a pivotal moment for the company to change. Gino knew he didn't want to do it that way anymore. He was ready to let go. He had passed the baton off to Mike Paton, who was the visionary at the time. And I was really hired to be his missing puzzle piece, his business partner running EOS Worldwide. Since that time, Mike Paton's gone back to being an EOS implementer, and Mark came out of the same.
 
Shannon Waller: Yeah, and where did Strategic Coach enter the scene for you?
 
Kelly Knight: So, you know, it's interesting. At the time, I was not a member of Strategic Coach. I was hearing about it a lot from Gino. Gino was mentoring me once a month for half a day. Imagine how amazing an opportunity that was. And so I was hearing a lot about how Strategic Coach and EOS together fit in, how really Strategic Coach had been instrumental in Gino's development of EOS. And then Mike Paton was a member of Strategic Coach as well. And then it was, you know, my kind of realization about five years ago, right before COVID, that I wanted to become a member too, because I wanted to be part of experiencing that firsthand. And of course, it was just as good or better than it had been described to me. And of course, members of our community, we have about Mark at this point, probably 30% of our community is in Strategic Coach, roughly. And it's always kind of been about that percentage. Of course, we just have 800 implementers, more than that now. So that number has increased too. So it really is just such a joy to hear about Strategic Coach, but there's nothing like experiencing it firsthand. And having the tools through COVID was really instrumental for us, too, because we were both, Strategic Coach and EOS, pivoting through this digital era, going through Zoom. And the timing was perfect that I had been in Coach one year prior. So it's really been a life changing experience for me and I'll never go back.
 
Dan Sullivan: Shannon, what was your own introduction? I don't remember exactly. Shannon is our great explorer in the company. Anything new that other people are doing, Shannon's the first person to go out and see what they're doing. And she's brought a tremendous number of our other profiling tools into the Program. But you're the only organization where it's a coaching organization. We're a coaching organization, that I'm really big into collaboration. I think in the StrengthsFinder profile, competition is in the 30s. You know, there's 34 strengths, and I think I'm somewhere, probably somewhere around 30 to 34. I'm not quite sure what it is. I've never seen any point to competing in the marketplace or, you know, being obsessed about what other coaching organizations are doing. I don't know if it would have happened if I didn't have the direct relationship with the creator of EOS. But I could just see there's just no friction here. There's no conflict. There's no friction. But Shannon, what was your introduction to EOS?
 
Shannon Waller: It was definitely through Gino in the Program, because I actually sit in the same workshop that he's in, and I'm usually where he sits in the room and where I sit in the room. It's not very far apart, which is really fun. So I've known Gino for almost all that time, knew about the books coming out, knew about Traction, got about halfway through it, to be perfectly honest. Thought it would be super useful, also knew I was not the right Who for that. We wanted some more structure. We had lots of leaders, like I think one of our team leader meetings before COVID, we had like 25, which we slimmed it down after we implemented EOS. So we were talking about adding some more structure, having meetings that needed to be more effective for Babs, Dan, was a big part of it. So we kind of looked at EOS, what the heck is EOS? It's such a great book, it's the simplified version. And it was like, oh, this would be great. And me, being a Coach facilitator, it was like, okay, well, let's do this. So we self-implemented, which is hard. I do not recommend it for anyone. I mean, by all means, get yourself started. It did help us fast-track a little bit. But then we were looking at really wanting to up our game. And it's also as being on the leadership team and also trying to facilitate the L10 meetings and the quarterlies. You can't actually sit in two seats. You can't actually do that because I want to participate, not just facilitate. It's a very different perspective. So anyway, we are starting to entertain the idea of having, you know, a supplement or come in, interviewed a couple of different people. Of course, you know, having Strategic Coach, your client is kind of a big deal. Anyway, Jill Young was the one who actually was the best fit with us and with Babs. And we started working with her. It was interesting because I think we started in September of 2019.
 
Dan Sullivan: Right.
 
Shannon Waller: Just with Jill.
 
Dan Sullivan: We had about six months in before COVID started.
 
Shannon Waller: And thank goodness, because I could not imagine trying to make decisions without having a simplified leadership structure and communication and all the other things that the system that EOS brings. Because you're right, Dan, like, even though I'm the one who created The Strategic Coach Team Programs, it's about how to share our tools and our thinking with team members. It's not a system. Right? It's like what Gino put together is a whole six-part system with multiple tools, etc. It is so complimentary, but it was great because, you know, we were around for the hearing about it being created and the books being written, but then also to get the benefit of it and be the recipient was a very profound shift for a Strategic Coach too. So that's kind of our story with it.
 
Dan Sullivan: What's changed? I'm just trying to think of the date there. It's, Kelly, when you and Mark really, really were the leadership duo for EOS. And a lot changed because I know the early stages of it really involved adjusting to COVID. But what would you say, if you had to name three things, Mark, you can combine with Kelly on this, what would be three things that have allowed you to scale suddenly, I would say from my standpoint, you've scaled enormously in the last three or four years.
 
Mark O'Donnell: Yeah, we have the first thing to talk about 2020. We were very much and still are an in-person organization where all of our sessions that implementers are facilitating with clients are in-person. No technology in front of a whiteboard. We did all of our conferences, our quarterly collaborative exchange. Everything we did was in-person and mostly technology-free. So we didn't have any capability of conducting a leadership team session remotely. And I was pretty much one of the only ones that did that at the time because I just experimented with a bunch of things. So that really, number one, being able to conduct sessions virtually all over the world has opened up a tremendous opportunity because you can be an EOS implementer and live on a boat docked in Costa Rica and do just fine. And so that has expanded our market quite significantly. And so today we have over 850 implementers doing business in 40 countries, and there are quite a few virtual only EOS implementers. So that was a big unlocking component in 2020.
 
And then not too far after that, we became a franchise. Franchisor. We became a franchisor. And so we were a membership organization prior to that. We became a franchisor and EOS implementers became franchisees and that in and of itself didn't create any particular scale. But what did was some of the strategic by-products of that. We were able to protect our IP in new ways. We were able to consolidate our brand from 738 different U.S. implementer brands down to one and so that is created such a huge unlocking mechanism where people now—it's sort of like the company that's always been around that no one ever knew existed. And then all of a sudden it's everywhere. And that was really just the brand flip of implementer brands to EOS Worldwide as a brand. And then the third thing we're just getting really started with, which would be our web platform and EOS One. And Kelly, why don't you go into that one?
 
Kelly Knight: Right. So we did not start off as a software company. That was not a thing for us. And so, you know, it was really about three years ago that we did decide there is a scalable way that we can digitize basically the platform of EOS tools, our process and our models, so that we can really transform the ability for entrepreneurs everywhere globally to experience EOS. because you might not have an EOS implementer in your backyard, sadly. So we set off to build software, and unfortunately, admittedly, I think there was hubris in that EOS Worldwide, who could better build software than EOS Worldwide? But it's just not true. And so the way that we went about doing it is not having, you know, we say Who, Not How. We just didn't have the right Whos to help us do that in a collaborative way that worked for us, right? There's a way to build software and there's a way to do that with an existing community of implementers and users that love and adore EOS.
 
And so we went through the hard and gut-wrenching process of needing to remove that, basically kill that first product and start from scratch all over again. But with the same belief in the vision, that is the right thing to do because we do want to get EOS rollout. That means EOS all the way through an organization, not just the leadership team, but everybody top to bottom running on EOS to get the most out of it, to create the vision and help companies scale. So we do believe that EOS One is that. So we have rebuilt that. We have all of our five foundational tools that launched in April. We're seeing some really great growth. We're right at about a million dollars of annual recurring revenue, which we're very excited about. So we're gaining that momentum and our implementer community is starting to really enjoy the new product as it's been built. So we're really excited about that. There was a lot of Experience Transformer, bothering tool, Uncertainty/Cerrtainty tools that we were using through that process of resetting ourselves. So if we weren't bothered, what would we be doing? What were the things that we knew that we were certain about that we had learned from because we're either on the learning team or the growing team? We learned a whole heck of a lot through that process.
 
And so now we feel like we're really beginning to get that Traction and win. So those are the three biggies. It's really COVID, as Mark said, and going to virtual and transforming everything that way, the franchise and unified brand, and then also EOS One. If I can add a fourth though, and Shannon, this is an ode to you. So The Team Success Handbook, you know, I'm a huge proponent of that. And I just feel like our team, every single person that comes into EOS as a new member must read it and agree with what's in that book. The Team Success Handbook has really been transformational. It is one of the small books that articulates exactly who we are and the type of people that we need in our organization to get where we wanna go and we wanna be a 10x organization. So I just love that. I think fundamentally while Strategic Coach is not an operating system and you're not aiming to serve the whole organization, some of your tools as we've taken them into EOS can really, really deepen the bench of how we're combining EOS with Strategic Coach to get the most out of our business. Cause we wanna be maximizers.
 
Shannon Waller: Dan, I want to jump in here because you and I have talked about this. Strategic Coach is very much a mindset program. So there's how you do it, right, which EOS is brilliant at. But then how do you think about it? And it's interesting because Team Success Handbook, Dan was like, write a book. I'm like, Okay. So I started to write a book.
 
Dan Sullivan: Write a book. I mean, that's a simple thing.
 
Shannon Waller: It's good when you don't know what you don't know. It's quite effective sometimes. So I started to write a book for entrepreneurs and then that wasn't going well. So then I started writing one for team members because they don't know that they need to have an entrepreneurial attitude. And that was easier because I'd been coaching the entrepreneurial attitude exercise for 12 years before I wrote the book and that was 10 years ago now. So it's like how to think. And team members need to know how to think about things too. Coaches, brilliant for helping visionaries think about their thinking. But there still is something for team members so that they understand that they don't need to be entrepreneurs. We don't necessarily want them to be unless that's their passion, but they do need to know how to think entrepreneurially. So Kelly, you've always been such a champion of that book. And I wrote it on behalf of entrepreneurs so that you wouldn't have to. It's for team members. Hand them out. But I really appreciate your support and how you use it in conversations with new people and say, if this isn't a fit for you, EOS won't be a fit for you. So that whole mindset approach, I think we have it for the visionaries, and then there are some obviously some tools for team members, too. So thanks for your validation of that.
 
Kelly Knight: Yeah, and our HR and people team also uses an Impact Filter for every single new seat that is being filled. And I think that that combination with really taking the time to go slow, to go fast, and really make sure that everybody, obviously the EOS thing is that we have shared vision and core values, but also the shared idea about how we're going to operate. You know, you go right in the earliest, you could probably tell me the exact page, but we're in Team Success Handbook, we're really comparing a bureaucratic kind of environment versus an entrepreneurial environment.
 
Shannon Waller: Page seven.
 
Kelly Knight: Thank you. I thought it was seven, but I didn't want to misquote your own book. And I just think that it is fundamentally, I would encourage any entrepreneur listening. If you haven't used that tool, not just to read for your own benefit or having your integrator read it or your managers read it is really top to bottom. I think it makes a huge difference for the mindset because Shannon mindset is everything, as you said.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, I think what's happened to the marketplace from your experience, I mean, Mark, you were very involved. I'm a one company man, but you had nine companies and you were in a very, very competitive industry where there's a lot of large players, massively global players. But if you reflect on what you were experiencing before EOS, before Strategic Coach, what you were experiencing, you're very much in touch with how your implementers are experiencing the marketplace. What are some of the changes that have just happened? It's a 10-year period, basically, what's happened over that 10-year period.
 
Mark O'Donnell: Yeah. So just to set the stage, when I came into the world of EOS and Strategic Coach exactly to your point, it's highly competitive market and bio and pharma and the consulting business around that engineering. And the idea of abundance versus scarcity is just completely and utterly foreign. The idea that there's more than enough to go around and human ingenuity and creativity creates just a never-ending amount of abundance for everyone is just not something that makes any remote sense to typical person. It is scarcity all day, every day, and anything you can do to get an edge, you'll take. So to me, from my mindset coming into Coach, that was really the key mindset shift for me. And it's something that all of our implementers coming out with Gino 25 years ago, starting into Coach, even the word abundance, I don't even think I heard the word before. It's like new vocabulary, you know?
 
That really has been a key piece of how I operate personally and implementers begin to operate because new implementers who come in also are coming in from no man's land of scarcity into the world of abundance and they begin to feel more freedom—the way they act, the way they think, and that trickles into family, and the way they spend their time, and it's just such a great shift. And if we then say, okay, how does that impact our clients? Is that really the way a client is working with an implementer, that client then starts to become a lot more abundance minded. They get a little bit more confidence and that confidence starts to grow and get bigger and bigger. And that's why we continuously, I think, in a workshop maybe eight years ago, I said to you, Dan, hey, it was just becoming an implementer. It was just starting full time. Like my goal is to get every implementer in Coach, because if we can then get their clients into Coach and get that abundance mindset shift, we can put a dent in the universe because now we've got the mindsets. We've got the creativity, we've got this unlocking of human potential, and then we have the EOS tools to go and execute and make it real.
 
And that continues today. That'll be interesting to see over this 10-year period because we really haven't experienced any particular recession or any macro things that might push people back into scarcity. I have a feeling it's going to hold up, but I think it's going to be a little bit more challenging to be in abundance if you are being told every day that there's scarcity and you're starting to see maybe revenues drop off. Where we sit today, we see a little bit of that. We see a little bit of pressure on revenues, a little pressure on sales. They're not coming as fast as they were just six months ago. But I think to the degree that we can keep people in the mindset of abundance and love versus scarcity and fear, we're just going to do a much better job and we'll make a dent.
 
Dan Sullivan: Kelly, you had a lot of experience before you entered into your role as the overall implementer for the entire EOS system. But what have you noticed, let's say, in the last 10 years? What have you noticed? I mean, you have two perspectives here, both front stage and back stage, both out in the marketplace and what's happening inside, and that has a lot to do with what are the mindsets of really talented, very committed people who want to be part of somebody else's organization. What are you seeing there?
 
Kelly Knight: Yeah, and I would echo what Mark has said around abundance mindset. I came from the financial services industry, having spent 18 years there, and it is the least, most abundance minded, loving, caring place. Maybe a person could exist, no offense to anyone out there, but just 18 years there, it was just not that. So coming into this world of EOS and Strategic Coach, it was eye opening for me as an entrepreneur myself, because I built and sold my own financial advisory practice way back in the day. But I think that's one big shift that is happening. But as a result of that, two things are happening. One is we're definitely seeing much more people focus this idea that, you know, you can't really go it alone, right? People don't scale, processes do, technology does, but I don't know an organization that doesn't have people in it, or very few, right? Very few don't have at least some people in it. So to the degree that you have people that are all channeled with vision and core values alignment, all thinking the same way, the 10x thinking ideally, that is the path to getting where you wanna go, better, faster, easier, cheaper, all of that. So I think that's one really big component to it.
 
I would also say that the abundance mindset lends itself to this Free Zone collaboration, which is just so much more fun. Anymore, if it's not a natural hand and glove fit, Mark and I just won't do it because we just don't want to. It just isn't fun. And so that was not always a thing in the past. You would do collaborations or partnerships or whatnot with people because it was the thing to do because we were cornering the marketplace. That's not true anymore. We're very laser focused on what our target market is. We're very comfortable with that. We're very comfortable with saying no for not only our own benefit, but for somebody else's too. And so that ability to let go of things is very different today than I would say it was 10 years ago. More greater good thinking around people in collaboration and how that mindset has to be really the same with everybody on your team—visionary integrators, leadership team members, and really everybody that we serve. We have 27 groups of stakeholders. I think this is one of the things that really has changed as well, is that if you think top to bottom with owners and shareholders, leadership team members, partners, collaborators, mid-managers, if you think top to bottom, there's far more people that we're influencing and even beyond that with our target market and clients. And it's thinking about how do those communications really work so that we're driving that vision forward better and faster. So that's one end result of all that.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. Shannon, you've been working with the teams of entrepreneurs, how many years now?
 
Shannon Waller: I started them in 1995.
 
Dan Sullivan: Everything more or less the same or big differences?
 
Shannon Waller: Huge differences, actually. It's really the development of the people side to what you were saying, Kelly. I think business owners are much more self-aware, partly with our help and all the profiles that we recommend that they do. So entrepreneurs are more self-aware. They're also more cognizant of who they need. The whole Unique Ability conversation, Dan, is so powerful. Because for any of us to be able to do our Unique Ability, we need to be surrounded, those very few activities, we need to be surrounded by people who are superb in all the areas that we're not. And so then you start to be much more appreciative of who you are, and then that allows you to be more appreciative of who other people are. So what we're noticing now with people coming into the Strategic Coach Team Programs is they are smart, well, they've always been smart, but they're really, really smart. They're much more self-aware. They're very committed. I'm noticing younger, too. Younger, very savvy. They're a joy to Coach. They are so much fun. They're very entrepreneurially minded. They appreciate the type of company they work for as opposed to a more bureaucratic one. They don't always know how to navigate it all. That's the thing. So that's where we help.
 
But that is very much what we're noticing is, I mean, I think our clients keep getting better and then the team members keep getting better as well. Because I think, I'm not even sure how all this has happened, but entrepreneurial leadership is getting better. I think through EOS, through Coach, people are becoming better leaders of their company. The leadership within the team is becoming, you know, better. And so that's just helping everyone expand, reach their capabilities, do their unique abilities. And so that's what we're seeing. The increase in quality is quite profound. There used to be a joke that one of our coaches coined because people coming to, this was The Assistant Program years ago. She had three terms, Dan, you might remember, this was Paulette, but one of them was shoppers. People who just looked at coming to a workshop offsite because they got to go to a new town and go shopping.
 
Dan Sullivan: Toronto, Chicago, LA, great shopping.
 
Shannon Waller: So they were not committed learners. Let me put it that way. We don't get that anymore, right? Now as people are like, here, I want to learn, I'm thrilled, they want to create community, you know, all of the things. So we're seeing an upgrade, put it that way. And people really appreciate being invested in. That is so obvious. It's like, oh, my gosh, I get to go here. You're going to pay money to travel. You know, if it's not an online program, travel, stay at a hotel, eat all the things so that I can learn. The benefit just from that is amazing, much less the content of what they're in context of what they're going to absorb. So that's long answer to your question, Dan. But I've I don't remember the third one. One was committed learners. One was shoppers. And there was some other—prisoners, prisoners. Those who are like both arms had to be twisted in order to go yeah, why am I here? There you go, the committed, the shoppers, and the prisoners.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, and it's tough for a coach to have all three in the room, you know. Yeah, the other thing, one of my, neither Babs or I, Babs Smith is my partner and we created Strategic Coach as it exists today. This is our 35th year. And neither of us are managers. I mean, you can just see by the Kolbe scores that we're not managers. I'm a 2-2-10-4 and Babs is a 3-3-9-2. Okay, well, getting up out of bed and getting ready for the day is about the extent of our management for the, by the time we get to interacting with the company, our management skills are all used up. So one of the things that I looked at right from the beginning, and this is just our experience of creating the early team of Strategic Coach, was that I want people to be self-managing. My emphasis, and we just had a great session, we had our London, UK team, we had our U.S. team, and we had our Canadian team on Zoom. And Zoom's been such a wonderful new capability for us. And we took them through a tool, which is the subject of a book that's just coming out for us, a small quarterly book called Casting Not Hiring. And if you hire people, they'll do what they're told. If you cast them into roles where they have a Unique Ability that keeps getting stronger and stronger, they become self-managing and they become team players. And every quarter you can see a jump in their initiation of new ideas, new projects for improving the team, helping the company.
 
And I just like to put together what I think is a model for the 21st century here, that I think that there's three factors that we're dealing with in the 21st century that's radically different from the 20th century. And that is that there's technology. There's technology, which is pervasive. The nature of technology is that it grows and it enters into more realms. And we know that, I mean, right from the beginning. But that wasn't so clear 35 years ago. It's totally clear today. The other one is teamwork. I never use the word employee. I'm not really interested in the word employee. That's for corporations. They have employees. I have team members. Okay. And team members are thinking about the whole team, the team that they're on. We have 12 different teams in Strategic Coach. But the big thing is the Strategic Coach team in relationship to the marketplace. But there's something missing between those two because technology does not coach itself, as you discovered. over the last three years. Technology does not coach itself.
 
Mark O'Donnell: It doesn't build itself either.
 
Dan Sullivan: It doesn't build itself and it doesn't really care. Basically, technology gives no thought to what you're up to. And teams don't necessarily use technology. It's not a natural step for teams to use technology. In the middle is coaching. There's an interesting stat that I've been following now for about 10 years, that IT is clearly the fastest growing industry in the world, information technology, in a billion different ways. Coaching is the number two fastest industry in the world. And the reason is you need coaching to connect teamwork and technology. It's not a number that I need to stay on top of, but we have hundreds of coaches in Strategic Coach. One of the things that we had to be careful with out of having lots and lots of other coaches is our IP, our intellectual property. And we've become great sleuths at finding out other people are using our ideas. And fortunately, we've only had one major lawsuit and we threw everything at this lawsuit. We said, we're going to end this right now. We're going to send a message out through the marketplace. And it was resolved in our favor.
 
And then I began to see that the entire economy in the world has gone through a profound change. And we have a really great IP lawyers, Caldwell Partners and Keegan Caldwell and Katie Rubino out of Boston. They show a diagram and it shows the S&P 500 in 1980. And it was, how do the 500 largest corporations in the United States, how are they valued? So you say such a corporation is worth this many billions and now trillions of dollars. How do you determine that? And it was 84% in 1980. It was 84% tangible. It was their property, it was their equipment, it was their fleets, everything, it was tangible. It weighed a lot, what made them tangible. Last year, in 2023, it had reversed itself. It was now 84% intangible, which seems to me it's totally in the realm of ideas that have been put into inventions, into processes. So what it tells me is two things become crucially important when you get that kind of change in the economy. And that is that people are crucial. Human beings with brains are really, really crucial. And then you have to have a tremendous way to connect the human beings with technology that really works for them. You have to have that. And I see this now that almost any business that's prospering as we go forward in the 21st century are those who have mastered how you have these three parts of your world working together, your technology, your teamwork, and your coaching, internal coaching, internal and external coaching. So that's sort of my notion. And it seems to me that all three of them are in our favor, the two organizations that we have.
 
Mark O'Donnell: Yeah, they definitely are.
 
Shannon Waller: Dan, you say coaching is to the 21st century.
 
Dan Sullivan: What management was to the 20th. Uh-huh.
 
Kelly Knight: Yeah.
 
Mark O'Donnell: Now, I think it's pretty interesting because when we think about coaching, we were talking about AI earlier with Perplexity, and I'm wondering what you think about AI being a great coach or does it have to be a human coach? Can technology be the coach?
 
Dan Sullivan: Good question. Well, I think it's an assistant coach, assistant coach, offensive coordinator. Yeah. In other words, I've just gone deep with one program, which is Perplexity, because I'm essentially, you know, a very highly distractible ADD guy. And I have questions and I go to Perplexity and I've worked out a relationship with Perplexity. I always say, tell me 10 things that are really important about this subject. I always start, I got 10 things about this subject. And five seconds later, I've got my 10 things. Perplexity doesn't know it's done that.
 
Mark O'Donnell: It just makes the correlations and spits it out.
 
Dan Sullivan: I'm just a flow of electrons for three seconds. That's all I am. But what I'm finding is that it's not really helping me doing because I have great teamwork to help my doing, but it's helping my thinking. So my sense is that for people who are thinkers, AI is going to be a great coach. For people who are non-thinkers, it's going to be a lot of foolishness that takes place.
 
Mark O'Donnell: Because people just blindly follow.
 
Dan Sullivan: I'll ask you the question with that framework, what's the conversation with EOS? These are the three factors that we have to pay attention to.
 
Mark O'Donnell: In terms of AI or the three people?
 
Dan Sullivan: No, if this is the way, not just the marketplace, but the whole economy, like the whole world economy and the U.S. is far ahead. Yeah. I mean, a lot of people say, well, China's not good at teamwork. they don't invite interesting innovations on the part of their team. They tell them what to do. There's a lot of countries in the world, you're in 40 of them. We have clients from 60 or so, but I think that America is going in this direction very, very strongly. You know, that the organizations, Peter Zion, great geopolitical thinker, he said in 20 years, the average size corporation in the United States— now, you remember, this is small businesses, big businesses, everything. If you're incorporated, you have this. The average size of the staff of a corporation 20 years ago was 24. Today, it's 12. Okay, so my sense is that we're into an entirely new realm. This is like a sea change. I mean, it's like the current was going this way and now the current's going that way. It makes a big difference on how you navigate. But the strength that you talked about, Mark and Kelly, when we started the podcast, is that you insist that this is a person-to-person business. And we insist that this is a person-to-person business. And my sense is the person-to-person is superior to whatever technology is going to be used.
 
Kelly Knight: Yeah, it's a tool. I think you're really onto something though, Dan, because the coaching, I mean, think about generationally, the younger generations, younger than the four of us on this podcast, okay? One of the things that I'm observing and also seeing in a lot of the research is that there's a lot more interest in understanding the why, not necessarily taking the management direction that's given to them directly. There is actually more desire for intellectual understanding. behind why we would be going a certain direction. Why is this vision this way? How come? And I think that's good. I think that's really good. And so that coaching component between teamwork and technology becomes that much more important because it isn't about management directly anymore. It's that leadership and management and accountability as we teach it at EOS. So I think there's something very interesting there that I can't wait to get my hands on this book, but I love where you're going with it. And I don't know how that transcends internationally necessarily.
 
Dan Sullivan: Because you asked the question, Mark, can the AI be the coaches? The AI can be content coaches, but they can't be context coaches. Only humans can be context coaches. Humans are the only ones that ask and answer why questions. Machines, they'll answer what questions, they'll answer how questions, but they won't answer why questions.
 
Mark O'Donnell: I think that's right. And what I am seeing is that the idea of apprenticeship is really coming back. And we can talk about that mentorship, mentee relationship as coaching, because let's say you have that shared vision, but you don't have the skills. You can't watch enough YouTube videos to actually go do it. You can't go to business school to learn leadership or management. You can really only learn it by doing it. And I think that we see this in our implementer community, is that Gino always said, there's things I can teach you and there's things you need to learn on your own. And the problem is we just don't know the line of which that is, right? And I think the world has this idea that we can just be taught everything and that we don't actually have to go learn things on our own. And I think that apprenticeship model, that coaching model where I do one and you watch, I do one and you help, and then you do one and I help, and then you do one and I watch, is really the way you're going to bridge the gap between the people, the technology, and producing a result that you want. And AI is not going to be able to do that in that way. Yes, it's a tool to maybe go faster, to maybe get answers a little bit faster, but it's not going to create craft. It's not going to create an outcome that you want.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. In my own sense, I talked to Peter Diamandis a lot about this, and we have some really skilled, innovative AI people in the Program. And I said, my own experience is that the biggest impact of AI is going to be putting into bold relief just why and how human intelligence is so important. I think we're going to find out more about ourselves by interacting with AI. I mean, I'll get a readout from Perplexity that's a page and a half. Very valuable, very valuable for my thinking. And I said, but there's not a thing that Perplexity could have done to trigger this answer. It was my prompt that got the answer going. So my sense is that coaching, really great coaches are great prompters.
 
Mark O'Donnell: And I'm pretty sure that your prompts are protectable in BigCom IP.
 
Shannon Waller: You're going to jump in, Kelly.
 
Kelly Knight: Well, you know, it's interesting. So one of the top questions I'm asked about Gino is how did he create a succession plan that worked? Okay, it's never any question by entrepreneurs who they themselves we know are looking at some point maybe to exit the business or have some type of transition. And Gino may answer it differently, but what I will say is that he invested, now this was before ChatGPT or Perplexity or any of that existed, but what he did do is he put in place the capability of really for he and I as his integrator coming in to meet once per month for half a day. And what that allowed is this iterative conversation where we would talk about certain themes, certain topics, the whys, the context setting that we're talking about. I would go off and take that learning and go apply it or come back with questions and clarifications about things with Gino. This is for five years straight. Not every entrepreneur is going to want to do that. But the point is that the thinking behind the thinking, the philosophies, the why, the unique capabilities of a certain organization to pass that on it really does involve that human-to-human contact. I don't think I could have ever, if ChatGPT had existed back in the day, that would not have been a tool that would have been useful to me to successfully take the reins over of EOS worldwide, right? And so it's a great tool, but I think Dan, I love your context-setting piece to that. And I think that's an important thing to understand is that it's not gonna be the one size fits all solution for everything that we're looking to do domestically here in the United States or internationally. It's a tool, it's a great tool.
 
Dan Sullivan: There's a hype when you introduce a new tool. And this was a highly visible introduction with open AI in November. I think it was November, last week of November 2022. And I remember some of the tech people in the Program said this changes everything, but they wouldn't say that two years later. Okay. I read a great book, just finished it at the cottage. It's called Same As Ever. Yeah. Morgan Hasel. Yeah. Yeah, and it's not his quote, he's quoting somebody, but he said a stock in the stock market, a stock is a present number times a future story. So when a new technology is created, they have a very, very small number, and then they tell a gigantic future story about what's going to happen. But Goldman Sachs, one of the more prominent investment banks in the world, said they're not seeing any return after two years. They're not seeing any return from the investment, massive investment in AI. And I think the reason is because they haven't introduced the level of coaching and teamwork into it. Nothing's valuable unless it improves human teamwork. That's right.
 
Shannon Waller: Well, and Dan, you also have defined technology as automated teamwork.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, well, all technology started off as teamwork, and then you saw that you could actually automate some of this teamwork as you went by. But, you know, I'm just looking at the longevity prospects for both EOS and the longevity prospects. Both of us have models that I can't see. If they were available a thousand years ago, they would have been extraordinarily valuable. A thousand years from now, they would still be probably more extraordinarily valuable. Yeah, so my sense is that that simplified your life and it simplified our life. We don't have to change our business model. Shannon Waller: And to your point about coaching, Dan, I think there will always be teamwork, and there will always be technology, and you will always need coaching to help that make sense. And, you know, you might get cooler, more interesting ways of doing it, but that's the function. And I want to tie this back to being a Self-Managing Company. People aren't self-managing by having great managers, but by having great coaches. That's how they learn their own strengths, their own capabilities, where they need teamwork. They should not delegate their unique capabilities. So I think coaching is the way to have leadership direction, charging up with energy. Yes, you know, being aligned, Kelly, 100%. If you're self-managing in the other direction, that's not gonna pay off very well, but when we're all aligned, then the coaching is actually the way to do that and to have it be growing and evolving and expanding into the future. So yeah, to me, coaching is A, something I love to do, but more importantly, I think it is the means to help us keep growing the way we're talking. Mm-hmm.
 
Dan Sullivan: Kelly, what have you thought about, what you're thinking about your thinking during this session?
 
Kelly Knight: Yeah, well, first of all, I just love the direction of where you're going with the coaching being sort of the bridge between the two. I had never really considered it that way. And as I'm thinking about EOS and also Strategic Coach, we do share a lot in common. We all have coaches of one shape or another, a coach or an EOS implementer. We all have books. We all have a web-based platform or Coach Connect. We've got EOS One. And so our business model is very much the same.
 
Dan Sullivan: And we're global, both of us are global.
 
Kelly Knight: Both of us are global, and it's a self-perpetuating model. So the more of any one of those three things that we have, the more it perpetuates the other two. So the more books we have, the more we coaching capabilities we have, and the more folks look to join our web-based platform and that kind of thing. So it's self-perpetuating, but at the center is really that bridge of the coach. What it makes me curious about is group coaching versus one-on-one coaching, the different levels of coaching, and how that then transforms into being the bridge that makes the difference. So it just makes me more curious about it.
 
Shannon Waller: So we just had a Coach meeting yesterday with all of our associate coaches, which was really fun. And one of the quotes that came out of it was, transformation only happens in groups. which I thought was really interesting. Now, I'm sure I could find a few exceptions to that. But, you know, when you coach a team, a company, it's the pinging off of ideas and exchanging and, you know, vulnerability-based trust and, you know, being open and sharing at deeper levels. That's when opportunities arise to do things differently. And we see that in the workshops. Dan, you used to coach one-on-one. And you notice that the accountability that happened in a group was way more than what a one-on-one coach could do. Now, I have my one-on-one coach for certain things, love it, wouldn't change it. However, I too, Dan, have been in the Program now for 33 years, this July, so many of my transformations are because of the feedback and the input and the mirror that people hold up to me in my own workshop. Right? So it's interesting. I think some transformation can happen individually, but I am completely convinced that, from an experience standpoint, that groups is where kind of the magic happens.
 
Dan Sullivan: I'll get to Mark with his learning, but Shannon, share with Kelly and Mark the scope of the team coaching that you did with Sonny Kalia.
 
Shannon Waller: Dan, do you mean like with his team?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, his worldwide team.
 
Shannon Waller: Oh yeah, it was so fun. So I got to, I'm going there next week, as a matter of fact. So it's really working with him on so many of the coach premises and mindsets and tools, because they have all of their members, right, that they have as part of his organization, over 300 or 400, I believe, and, you know, letting them know about 10X Thinking.
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, they're in India, right, mostly?
 
Shannon Waller: Mm-hmm, yep. Yeah, they're all in India. So this was all coaching to India. Yeah.
 
Dan Sullivan: From Toronto, right?
 
Shannon Waller: Yeah, the interesting thing about India is, per history, everyone speaks English. With a very different cadence.
 
Dan Sullivan: The ones you talk to, too.
 
Shannon Waller: Yeah. Well, they're all educated in English, but a very different cadence. So it took a couple of days for both of us to adjust. But it was so phenomenal, Dan, because everyone could understand The Experience Transformer, The Strategy Circle. You know, everyone could set one-year goals and Unique Ability and Kolbe. So it was phenomenal how cool and transferable it was, you know, to be able to go across the planet from Toronto, where I am, and have entrepreneurial-minded conversations with tools to help them grow. And then they would take it and coach each other on it. It was phenomenal. And actually might be going back, which I'm very excited about doing. So, yeah, it's so transferable. But again, guru means teacher. I always think of guru as something super elevated. Anyway, apparently it's just teacher. But you're really respected for bringing that kind of thinking to other environments. It was magical.
 
Dan Sullivan: And not possible without Zoom.
 
Shannon Waller: No, definitely not.
 
Dan Sullivan: So there's technology being a great assistant. Mark, your own learning, things that have popped up since we started talking?
 
Mark O'Donnell: Well, a lot of things have popped up. Try to simplify it as much as I possibly can. Well, that's what you're 2 Fact Finders for. So as I was kind of thinking about really that shift to intellectual property in terms of the large percentage of the value of the S&P 500 being locked up in intangible assets. Well, what are those intangible assets? And then thinking about this three-step people coaching technology. And what that reminds me of is, and I remember, Dan, you taught this in a workshop a long time ago, which was DIKW. And really, if you kind of think about data, information, knowledge, and wisdom, and wisdom is the result of experience, basically. And so what I think is that what will be true forever and where the real value is, the real value is in wisdom. And if you take people, you take the coaching, it's drawing out that and you're merging it with technology. Yes, you're leveraging the data, you're leveraging the information, the knowledge, and it creates wisdom. And I think that's really where all the value is getting created by a company like ours at EOS and at Strategic Coach is the systematic way to produce timeless wisdom that people can then go and apply to every aspect of their life. So that was sort of what was popping up for me as you were going through that.
 
Dan Sullivan: It's a great conversation. I mean, my formal education before, you know, in my 20s was at a school called St. John's College, and it's in Annapolis. And St. John's is the great books college. And all you do is read and discuss the ideas in the great books, starting with the Greeks, coming right up to the 20th century. But they haven't had the impact on the world, and they were sort of a combination of a museum and a monastery, okay, in the sense that there were these sacred texts, and they were sort of the monks that made sure that these weren't intruded on from the outside, or there wasn't sacrilege going on and everything like that. But I said, yeah, but what's your conversation with the world? And I was lucky because I didn't start. I was a freshman at age 23, and I had been through the army. I had two years during the Vietnam War. I had worked at the FBI for two years right out of high school. I had done a lot of really interesting theatrical work over the four- or five-year period after high school. And I'd gone to Outward Bound, which to this day, it's the greatest educational experience I had. And my sense is, I think the real key here is to sell wisdom. Pretty sure you're holding it in, you know, and great place. I learned a lot and everything, but I just don't see the impact on the world, you know? And I think that what we're doing is creating wisdom, gaining systems, very simple, very consistent over time creates an enormous amount of institutional wisdom within the entrepreneurial companies.
 
Mark O'Donnell: Cause you end up getting connected. I hadn't said that.
 
Kelly Knight: Uh-huh.
 
Mark O'Donnell: Yeah, I love that. That wisdom. You can go read it in the old texts and things.
 
Dan Sullivan: I just guaranteed that they'll never have me back as a speaker. St. John's. Yeah. Well, I don't send them checks either.
 
Mark O'Donnell: So you can't go read it in a book, right? I mean, it has to come through gained experience. And I think most people kind of go through a full circle. Like, yeah. Okay. I read that. Move on, I'm smarter, I'm better, I'm faster. And we make it all things complex and it sort of just comes back down to the wisdom then.
 
Kelly Knight: And wisdom comes with battle scars, right? I mean, it's not roses, rainbows, and lollipops. You know, wisdom doesn't really come from that.
 
Dan Sullivan: You've got to have body blows. All right. I'm thrilled with the conversation we had. And I, I think for our community hearing about EOS from the two lead individuals worldwide, I think is a great service to us. You might want to send this out to all your community too. Yes. Yeah. Positive Focus, Shannon.
 
Shannon Waller: Just such a treat to hang out with everyone. A question comes up all the time, what's the difference between EOS and Strategic Coach and which one should I do and the rest of it? And the answer is both. You know, it goes back to that abundance because they serve a different purpose. I mean, one of the other things we have in common is we serve entrepreneurs and their companies. And so we have so much in common and we're so complimentary. So I just appreciate diving into all the things, the history of how each of you got started. I don't think I actually knew your story, Mark. So that was pretty fun and pretty cool that EOS and Coach entered your life at the same time. And I think the whole conversation about being self-managing and the current marketplace, especially with regard to people and coaching and wanting self-managing team members to me is fascinating. So my brain's alive with lots of fun ideas and future conversations. So thank you.
 
Dan Sullivan: Kelly, that was your thinking report, now just your Positive Focus.
 
Kelly Knight: Yeah, my Positive Focus is every single time I have an opportunity to be together with all of you, it just deepens my appreciation and respect and gratitude for what we have together. It's very special. I don't know how to even sometimes describe it to others, but the fact that we have such a trusting relationship with one another and support one another, but it's just, again, done so organically, hand in glove is just a very natural fit. And we just love you all at Strategic Coach. I'm happy that Mark and I have been able to take the baton from Gino and to be able to continue to work collaboratively with you. Our community appreciates being part of what you're doing, our team does. So I just, I look forward to the future.
 
Dan Sullivan: Okay. And Mark Positive Focus.
 
Mark O'Donnell: To reiterate, Kelly is just a pleasure as always. Super grateful for the conversation and the collaboration and Shannon, when people ask me, well, what's the difference between Coach and EOS? I'm like, well, what's the difference between water and air? And they're like, well, what do you mean? They're totally different. I'm like, yeah. But you need both. Right. You can't survive without either. So that's my definition.
 
Shannon Waller: I'm totally stealing that just so you know.
 
Mark O'Donnell: And they get very confused right away. I'm like, what are you even saying? I don't even understand what just happened to me. So, yeah, I mean, exactly as Kelly said, the Free Zone collaboration, where no money exchanges hands and you appreciate the Unique Ability of what Coach does and what EOS does is really priceless. It is not well understood by the scarcity world, but it's celebrated by the abundance world. That's what I got.
 
Dan Sullivan: Thank you. And I remember when we sort of kicked off our monthly calls just for everybody out there. We've initiated a podcast series called Coaching Collaboration between EOS and Strategic Coach. We have an AI newsletter that goes out every two weeks and we'll put this particular podcast as one of the features. When we got going, I said, let's do this for 25 years and see what comes of it. And I'm very, very pleased. You know, the seeds are out of the ground. We're starting to see plants. You know, it's really good. So Kelly, I'll see you in a couple of weeks. Mark, I'll see you at our next monthly meeting and our next podcast meeting and at Free Zone in October.
 
Mark O'Donnell: That's right. And Shannon, I'll see you next week.
 
Shannon Waller: Yeah. Cannot wait.
 
Kelly Knight: Always a pleasure. Great to see you. Thanks, everyone.