ep. 42 - Dr. Jackie Freiberg: Thought Leader & International Best-Selling Author
Bio
Dr. Jackie Freiberg is dedicated to helping leaders create BEST places where the BEST people can do their BEST work to make the world BETTER.
For over 27 years, Jackie has been on a mission to expose the unconventional, business-best practices of globally admired leaders. Concrete Examples Entertaining Stories Valuable Takeaways. Just a few reasons why clients in every part of the world invite Jackie Freiberg to be their featured speaker.
Transcript
ep. 42 - Dr. Jackie Freiberg: Thought Leader & International Best-Selling Author
Kyle Davis: Well, with us today on GDA Podcast is Dr. Jackie Freiberg or Jackie or however we were talking about earlier prior to recording. She is one of the authors of the new book Cause! which the [00:01:00] subtitle is A Business Strategy for Standing Out in a Sea of Sameness. She's been putting out these phenomenal books. I think this is number seven in the series about top places to work and thrive and a whole bunch of other fun stuff.
She's been doing this now for the past 28 years. With that being said, welcome to the podcast, Jackie. How are you?
Jackie Freiberg: I'm well, thank you. How are you?
Kyle Davis: I'm living the dream one day at a time.
Jackie Freiberg: That's [00:01:30] a good thing. Most people listening would like to be living the dream. That's probably why they're listening.
Kyle Davis: I would sure hope so. Let's start with the book Cause! and then we can meander back to the beginning. What's new about this book and what are you seeing in the workplace today?
Jackie Freiberg: Well, I'll tell you that this [00:02:00] is something that a lot of people are thinking about, are wanting and are writing about and even listening for. It's not just going to work for a paycheck but it's going to work and knowing that the gifts and the talents that you invest every day in a job are actually making a difference in the world.
There's a barometer called the Edelman trust barometer that measures trust levels in the United States. [00:02:30] What they found in the most recent trust barometer is in 2016 they found 80% of people in this country do not trust our government to fix or help with our societal issues or problem but 80% of those same people believe that businesses can help but not just any business, businesses that are profitable and businesses [00:03:00] that have attached them self to a mission, a purpose, or a cause to help enhance or make their corner of the world a little bit better.
That's the issue that's at play today. People want to go to work for a company that's mission or purpose or cause driven. People want to do business with companies that are mission and cause driven. We find that these kinds of businesses have higher levels of profitability. [00:03:30] They also have higher engagement levels and customers are far more loyal. This is an issue that if you're in any kind of business at all today if you do not have a vibrant, well-known statement about what you do beyond just business, your business could be doomed in the future, that's the relevant issue today.
Kyle Davis: It's one that has been a trend or a topic [00:04:00] of discussion in recent episodes of GDA Podcast. What I like about the succinct way in which you say that people look at companies and it has to be one or three things, a mission, a purpose, or a cause. They also have to be profitable as well. I think, when people think about millennials and different things like that, they're thinking of us being lazy and everything else.
Then you look at all those great tech companies out on Silicon Valley, they're being driven by millennials who have bought into the cause [00:04:30] or have bought into the purpose. Is this something that's a new thing with the tech boom or is this something that even more "legacy" companies have been doing for a while?
Jackie Freiberg: Kyle, thanks for even asking that question. I think that shows you're a thinker and you're connecting dots. A lot of people will claim that this is a trend because we have a lot more millennials working in various different kinds [00:05:00] of companies today. We can go back a century.
Henry Ford said a business that makes nothing but money is a poor business. Think about how long ago that was but yet that was a trending issue even back then. I think what's happening is people believe that millennials are a tipping or creating a tipping point in business but really, if you ask and you push and you put [00:05:30] pressure on our boomers or X generation who are also employed today, most of them will admit to the fact they want to know that when they go to work and invest 40 plus hours a week in a day or in a week and then think about that added up over a career every one of us regardless of what our gender is, what our age is, what our demographic is, at the end [00:06:00] of the day we all want to know that we are doing something to make our corner of the world a little bit better.
When we can go to work and know that we're doing that as well as work, think about the double bonus that's right there. I don't think it's just a trend based upon millennials. I think it's a trend that's just people look around and they say, "Look, this world has issues. If we can work [00:06:30] and make a difference in those issues, if we can buy and make a difference in eliminating some of those issues, both of those are really good things," and I intentionally used the word good. It's really about doing good in the world and doing good at work.
Kyle Davis: I couldn't agree more on that statement. It's about finding the good and really what it is that you're doing in the day to day. What I personally [00:07:00] having worked in startups in Silicon Valley, San Francisco and New York is the startups that get it, I'm sure one of them had all the money in the world and another one just didn't but there was this culture of success, of support, and this solution or this tool or whatever that we're bringing to market is really helpful. It's a legitimate help. I didn't feel in a sales capacity like I was short changing anybody or selling them something [00:07:30] that they didn't need. I was selling them something that I believed in and that was easy to convey to my clients.
Jackie Freiberg: Yeah. It doesn't matter what your business is. It doesn't matter what service you provide, the bottom line is if you look deep enough and you go broad enough, you will find an impact that your business or your service is having on the community that it most serves.
Here's just a really specific example. [00:08:00] I'm doing a keynote presentation for an association and this is an association where there will be close to 1600 dentists. Cosmetic dentistry is the big thing. These dentists who are some are accredited, some are fellows, so they are the best of the best in their industry and these people will bring their staff. You've got hygienists, you've got assistants, you've [00:08:30] got receptionists that will be joining them.
The more research that I did on this particular group, the more I discovered they're in the business of improving people's smiles. What we do if you go deep on that you realize that when people smile, there are some significant benefits to smiling. You actually become more creative, you become more productive, you can actually strengthen your cellular [00:09:00] tissue to fight off cancer and other mutant cells.
It's contagious to smile so you smile if someone else smiles. There are just all these … What seem like basic fundamental benefits from smiling but I wonder if the people who are the receptionist at all of these dental practices know that when they welcome someone into that office, they could in fact [00:09:30] be improving the quality of that person's life by simply improving a smile.
I mean I might be stretching it on that one but the bottom line here is I'm just trying to give you a very basic example of the fact that any business and any service can find the heroism in their work if they choose to look at it that way.
Then what happens is the people that come to work with you are more enhanced, more alive, more vibrant, more engaged, [00:10:00] and when they're alive and more engaged in doing business with your customers and your clients, your clients, your customers, your patients walk away and they feel like wow, that person made a difference in my life. Wow, that person smiled at me. Wow, that person turned up the volume on a service experience for me. I'm going to recommend them.
You see the ripple effect that becomes a wave, a wave and a tsunami of success.
Kyle Davis: Yeah, it's the butterfly effect [00:10:30] of good karma. It's doing the right thing and getting stuff out of there. I don't think you're really stretching it when you're talking about improving someone's smile, you really do improve their life. I mean you think about … I'm trying to think about the organization as it goes to places in South America and Africa to go fix cleft palates.
That little procedure changes someone's life forever.
Jackie Freiberg: Well, and even in this particular [00:11:00] group, they've actually got a foundation that's all about give back a smile and what's fascinating about that is they actually will donate their services to improve smiles of people who are victims of domestic violence and violence that has in fact harmed their mouth, their teeth, their jaws.
Kyle Davis: Wow.
Jackie Freiberg: Yeah. I mean they're doing good even in the foundation but look, you don't even have to give to a foundation, you don't even have to dedicate or [00:11:30] donate your services, all you have to do is remind your staff that we enhance smiles and what they believe is they believe that the smile is the window or the glimpse into the soul. A lot of people think it's the eyes. They believe it's the smile.
Look, what do you have in your business or what do you have as your service and what could you do to remind people that are providing those products and providing those services. What could you do to remind them that their efforts and their skills [00:12:00] and their talents, their time is making a difference to people and improving the lives of others.
Kyle Davis: In the new book Cause!, I understand the mission, the purpose and the cause that people need to have to rally behind to really make an exciting place to work with and everything else. What are some other takeaways that you're taking or you're seeing [00:12:30] from some of these top-performing companies?
Jackie Freiberg: Well, one of the things that we've highlighted in the book is the fact that if you look at what companies want to manage and want to improve upon, it's typically attracting the right talent and then once you attract the right talent, the right people into your organization you want to hang on to them and once you hang on to them you want to know that they are [00:13:00] engaged, they are fully present at work, they are excited about the works that they do and they participate.
They give their ideas and not only do they provide ideas for improvement, lowering cost, improving service but in addition to that, they want to stay and they want to do their part to turn up the volume on service and business efficiency.
[00:13:30] All of those things that I just mentioned, being a magnet for great talent then holding on to that talent and then improving engagement, which most companies are measuring these days. The sad truth is most engagement scores within organizations haven't improved a whole lot. People are measuring it but they don't necessarily know what to do to turn it up or to improve [00:14:00] it.
Cause, purpose, mission, are things that will help grow engagement and being able to invite people every day, not necessarily all day, to think about the fact that when you come to work you're also making a difference in the lives of your colleagues, in the lives of your customers, and in the lives of the community.
It's [00:14:30] a fundamental connection and business owners and oftentimes leaders aren't necessarily making that connection but if they do, they'll find that people are more inclined to want to apply for jobs at those places. People are more inclined to want to stay. People are more inclined to do a really great job on the job and then customers are more inclined to tell you a story and be really great advocates for your brand and your services and your products and guess what, it becomes a really good upward trajectory.
Kyle Davis: [00:15:00] One of things that I'm reminded of from a previous podcast that we recorded just recently was this idea that if you're going to have this phenomenal stuff and culture and everything else that you have to think about really, where does it begin in the beginning, all the way back, the whole process, whether it's from the beginning. Like you said when we just started. Do you have a well thought out mission statement or purpose or cause that you're fighting for?
[00:15:30] Then from there, have you thought what you're recruiting these are and how you're going to do your recruiting? Have you thought about your onboarding process, have you thought about all these things, because all of those little tweaks and changes and massages, if you will, really allow you to better facilitate and to better bolster whatever your mission or purpose or cause is.
Jackie Freiberg: Yeah, for sure. We've been proponents since we … Our very first book was an [00:16:00] international bestseller on Southwest Airlines. The title of the book was Nuts!. It was their crazy recipe for business and personal success and that book still sells thousands of copies a month.
One of the big issues or the big chapters in that book was hire for attitude, train for skill. One of the things that Southwest was known for saying is hire people who don't suck, who don't suck passion and energy and enthusiasm out of their colleagues and out of every customer or client that you happen to be serving.
[00:16:30] Yeah, you have to make sure that when you hire someone into your organization, into your business whether you're small medium or large, that person is a cultural fit. If they're not and if they've just got great skill but their attitude is questionable, hey, don't compromise. Don't put a warm body in a place because you've been looking and interviewing and trying for too long now to put a warm [00:17:00] body in and you just can't do without any longer wait because that one person who has the right skill but the bad attitude will suck the life and the passion and the energy out of everybody, and you'll regret it, you just will regret it.
Not only do you have to hire and get the right people in, then you've got to have an onboarding or a celebration process that helps people understand what does it means to succeed in this organization, what are the career-limiting moves in this [00:17:30] organization.
You've got to have a really good process for bringing people in and sharing the values and the mission and the purpose of the organization. Then you have to move out of the way and invite people to bring their ideas to the table to ideate. Look, 52% of people who come to work today are frustrated. You know why they're frustrated, Kyle? They're frustrated because they have ideas and they presented [00:18:00] their ideas to a colleague or a manager or a boss and guess what happens to those ideas?
Kyle Davis: They got shot down or they're not listened to.
Jackie Freiberg: Exactly, both of those things. They either get lost in this vortex of nothingness or they get shot down. "Well, we tried that before. Well, that won't work here. Well, we don't have the resources. Well, we don't have the time." No, they'll never buy into that. You get any one [00:18:30] of those things or a combination of those responses and then slowly but surely, guess what people start to do. They begin to check out and they become what we call dead people working. They physically show up but they're emotionally intellectually and psychologically checked out.
Those are not the people that are going to want to do whatever it takes to serve a customer, do whatever it takes to drive cost [00:19:00] out, do whatever it takes to get that project pushed through.
Kyle Davis: You reminded me with your zombie phrase, you reminded me of what mine was which is an economic vampire, someone who just sucks the life out of you.
Jackie Freiberg: Yeah.
Kyle Davis: We use that phrase for change management issues like we're course correcting. We're going to go in another direction. It's going to be the benefit of 95% of the people here. There's [00:19:30] the segment of the population who's just not with it. They don't want it changed. They don't see the benefits. You work to keep as many of those people as you can because maybe they can be swayed or they can be trained or they can have that moment of clarity, if you will. Then there's just population in that 5% that you need to hire right but at the same point in time you need to fire right too.
Jackie Freiberg: Yeah, you know, I have never ever in my entire career and I've been doing this for [00:20:00] maybe, I hate to age myself, but maybe 30 years now, almost. I've have never heard a leader or a manager say after they had let someone go, "Boy, I wished I had held on to them just a little bit longer." Never.
Kyle Davis: Instead it's more of the inverse. It's like, "Man, I wish I would have done that sooner."
Jackie Freiberg: Exactly. I think there's a lot to be said for yeah, don't hold on to someone who isn't [00:20:30] a fit. At the same time, I also think there are some significant issues that are related to change initiatives. Look, I don't work any organizations that aren't up against tremendous change. The way of the world is change. That's the standard mantra. Change is constant but in the eyes, in the heart, and the spirits and the souls of the people who are in the midst of trying to work through this change or lead [00:21:00] and facilitate this change, one of the things that tends to happen in those kinds of processes or those kinds of times is people will look at their managers and if their managers and leaders are not transparent, are not engaging them in the change process and enabling them in the change process and being available through that change process, people become insecure. [00:21:30] When people are insecure they operate out of fear. When we operate out of fear we are never operating at our optimum or at our best.
Leaders, beware, if you are in the midst of change you need to be transparent, you need to be engaging, solicit ideas from your people and you need to enable them, not discourage them by saying that's not going to work, it's not the right time or nothing or do [00:22:00] nothing with the ideas. We've got to be leaders who are empowering our people and enabling our people.
Kyle Davis: I'm trying to remember what the company was. There's some comparison at some book. Man, I wish I knew what it was. It was talking about some change situation that had to happen. One company brought in a management consulting firm and they did it all behind closed doors and blah, blah, blah and then next thing leads to another and it's pink slip Friday.
That company just fizzled out [00:22:30] like a grape on a vine. Then the other company just was upfront and honest from the beginning and said hey, these are some things that are going to happen down the line or could happen. They had real buy in and sure some people left but they left on better terms. The motivation morale remained, maybe even went higher. It was a different way of doing things and it just had to deal with being transparent and honest.
Jackie Freiberg: Yeah. I think one of the things that we have to be really good at communicating to leaders [00:23:00] in all industries and all organizations is the fact that leadership isn't about having all the answers. Maybe that's what it was a long, long time ago when Henry Ford, going back to the century ago, was creating and leading Ford.
Today, leadership is about engaging the ideas of a large collective or a large community, or a large group of people because in those people with [00:23:30] diverse ideas and diverse perspectives and diverse insights on what is it going to take to move this business in an upward trajectory. In those different ideas or those different people, you will find maybe not the right answer but those answers collectively are going to lead to the right answer.
Leaders just have to realize that leadership isn't about having all the answers. Leadership is about engaging people to invest their insights on what the great ideas [00:24:00] might be.
Kyle Davis: One of the things we're doing, just go back to and just talk about for a moment, was this level. I think the percentage was that 52% of people who go to work are frustrated because their ideas are ignored or passed over. What is it that maybe prevents somebody or prevents a leader from taking in those suggestions and more importantly, what can a company or a leader do to instill a culture [00:24:30] where, hey, it's great to tell me all of these ideas that you have and we can agree or we have a level of understanding without necessarily agreeing on everything but to really have that ideation that you talked about, to really facilitate a culture of growth and change.
Jackie Freiberg: I'm grateful that you asked that question and circled back to that particular point because I think that's really important. A lot of times when people are frustrated because nothing happens to their ideas, let's just face it, sometimes those people expect that [00:25:00] when I give an idea to my colleague or my manager, they're going to run with it, and that's not what ideation is about.
If you have an idea, then you present it to someone hopefully you've thought through it to some level where you can say, "Hey, here is the ROI on this idea and here's who I think I would like to partner with or collaborate with to bring this idea to life. Here's what I think the investment of time and resources [00:25:30] and maybe the financial investment is and bring in this to life."
When you have an idea as an individual contributor, you should make sure that you've created to use this simple language, a business plan around it. If you just have an idea and you want to bounce it off someone, simply tell them this is just for bouncing around a little bit and then I will create a business plan for it. The bottom line is, is in organizations, we've got to as leaders [00:26:00] and managers be open to ideas and as leaders and managers provide training so that we can equip people with what it means to bring an idea to life.
Is that a business plan? Is that an ROI? Is that connection to colleagues you can collaborate with? Is that an investment of this amount time? People need to be able to answer those questions.
Kyle Davis: One of the interesting things that you see out in Silicon Valley is, it might be an innovation hour where engineers and designers get an hour a day [00:26:30] to work on whatever pet project that they want to do or a hackathon or a hack week, something where you're not working on your day to day duties but you're able to really shift your time, effort and energy into something that you have your passion about and either it gives you purpose if you will and then you present it to these companies.
I've seen a lot of previous companies I've worked for I've seen really cool ideas come out of that, things that [00:27:00] opened up multimillion dollar lines of revenue. I'm just wondering should companies or not every company obviously is going to have the time or resources to vote to that but should companies foster this innovation or foster this idea of growth and bringing ideas in?
Jackie Freiberg: Yes, yes, yes, yes. How can I be any more emphatic than that?
Kyle Davis: Softball, right?
Jackie Freiberg: Yes. Well, and let me just tell you, [00:27:30] I think you're right. I think the routine of life, the routine of any given day can blind us to the opportunities that are before us. The routine of checking email, going to staff meetings, going to other kinds of meeting, doing the day as usual will oftentimes get in the way of doing those passion projects that you mentioned and so they get pushed to the side, pushed to the side, pushed to the side until all of a sudden there's so many things that are piled up on them [00:28:00] that we forgotten we even have a passion for them.
An organization that wants to create a culture of innovation and wants to build the DNA into the spirit of every individual so that everyone knows innovation is everyone's job. We'll create a dare to try morning or a dare to try hour or a dare to try day a month, whatever it happens to be.
Because if you think [00:28:30] about our productivity, I'm saying on average here, most people are most productive between eight in the morning and noon. Not all people, but most people. Those are the hours in most organizations and in most businesses where we are typically consumed with meetings or email or some other sort of conference call.
Wouldn't it be great to say, look, you as an individual know what you're most productive is, what if you were to craft [00:29:00] out or block out, you know, that a four-hour period once a month where you could actually dare to try?
Not individually either, what if you figured out what people's passions were? What people's improvement ideas were? Then you actually allowed people to collaborate during those dare to try sessions. That's the way to inspire a culture of innovation.
Kyle Davis: You mentioned something that's near and dear to my heart but I don't take … I'd say [00:29:30] that now, I'm not in sales capacity anymore but one of the previous companies I worked for we basically just had an unwritten rule where there's no sales call, there's no client meeting, nothing like of the sort happening after lunch. Because once we had our lunch and the 2 o'clock feeling hit, we just weren't on point. We weren't on edge and we had so much administrative stuff to do and you know X, Y, Z.
It just it felt better and it felt more impactful just to focus those hours of heavy hitting [00:30:00] in the morning. That's my take away on that.
Jackie Freiberg: Yeah, absolutely. You as an individual have to know what you're most productive time is and then make sure that you are doing the most high leverage activities during your productive time. The other thing I think that's important to keep in mind here is when you're really trying to focus and be as creative as possible, eliminate the distractions.
[00:30:30] I mean, put the smart phones away, put anything that could call your attention away from what you are focusing on intensely. Eliminate them because, look, if you look at the bigger picture, frivolous distractions can take us out in any given day. What if we ask people, right here right now, think about it. What are your top three frivolous distractions and what if you eliminated those during your dare to try sessions?
Kyle Davis: [00:31:00] There's an app you can download or a Google Chrome extension that lets you know what websites you visit and how much time you actually spend on that particular tab and so then you can modify your setting so that it blocks deterring or detrimental websites whether it'd be Facebook or Twitter or something else.
Jackie Freiberg: Yeah, I was a judge at the University of Utah's Innovation [00:31:30] Showcase. They had over 500 students who are business scholars, I'm coming up with an innovation and then they got to be in this big open what they call Lassonde Center presenting their innovative ideas.
They were all teams of students and one of the ideas was a replica of that but it was specifically designed for students. Middle school students [00:32:00] to college-aged students who are distracted by the technology around them and it would block out all that stuff and give them the freedom to focus on either studying for an exam or doing a paper or focusing on whatever it was they needed to concentrate on. Pretty cool.
Kyle Davis: Yeah, I like it. One of the things we've talked about. We're hitting on engagement. We've hit on the purpose, mission and cause. Profitability, I think we'll [00:32:30] both agree is a no brain and we don't really have to spend that much time on it.
Let's talk about customer loyalty and going back to your first book, Nuts! I live in Dallas, the home of Southwest Airlines. To say that an airline has a loyal following in a day and age where people hate to travel, Southwest Airlines actually has a loyal following of people.
What is it about a company like Southwest or other companies that really have honed in and really thought about customer loyalty?
Jackie Freiberg: [00:33:00] Well, I think if you look back at the history of Southwest Airlines, one of the things that most people don't know but we know it because we wrote their story is it probably 48 years ago now when Southwest was founded.
The leaders who literally championed this initiative of getting Southwest off the ground and into the sky did so because when they looked [00:33:30] around in Texas, they realized that it was almost impossible to fly unless you are wealthy or you were flying for business. Herb Kelleher said, look, that's an affront to democracy.
In designing and in building and starting this airline, we want to make flying affordable for all people, not just the wealthy and not just the business travelers. We want to make [00:34:00] flying affordable for all people so that ordinary people can go places, see things and do things that they never dreamed possible because flying was too expensive.
Southwest Airlines, even though I hate to be saying this publicly but their fares are competitive now, they're not less expensive, they're competitive with all the other carriers but in their day, they brought flying prices [00:34:30] down and they allowed people to go visit family that were not able to do that, they allowed businesses to expand so customers became extremely loyal because they knew, wow, you know this is a company that has our interest in mind.
What my husband and I, Kevin and I write and speak together in most of the work that we do, we speak individually, we speak together but we write together.
[00:35:00] One of the things that we really committed to is only writing about companies that are really about being profitable but also being purposed and caused driven. You fast forward from Southwest Airlines in terms of democratizing disguise. Why did we write this book called Cause! now?
Well, we found an insurance company in Vermont in Texas that actually is about [00:35:30] doing good for Middle America, democratizing, not disguising this case but democratizing insurance.
They've created a life insurance product that you don't have to die to benefit from. If you actually suffer a chronic illness or a really serious injury or you happen to live, not die but live longer than you expect than your nest egg can provide for, this is a life insurance policy that will help you in all three of those [00:36:00] instances.
We thought, wow, they're democratizing Middle America by making financial freedom available to lots of people who didn't necessarily know that this was a product that was available.
Kyle Davis: Yeah, even I look at companies and I think of the big ones, there is like an element of democratization that goes on through it, you know. Whether it's my previous employer's square which I give many shout outs to democratizing commerce for every day small business owners or if it's [00:36:30] Southwest democratizing travel or the skies or this insurance company doing the same.
It's something that allows people to have something that normally seems out of reach.
Jackie Freiberg: Absolutely. I think one of the things that we've realized is it doesn't matter what age group you are in but the "she-economy" whether you are a millennial, whether you are a [00:37:00] boomer or whether you are of the ex-generation. Let me tell you, the she-economy, women own the purchasing power in this country.
What that means is they will invest their dollars in businesses that they know are giving back to society. Businesses that they know will help them better care for their families, their children, their communities, [00:37:30] their colleagues, their friends and the list goes on and on and on or anyone of the causes that women tend to hold near and dear to their heart.
It doesn't matter what industry you fall in, women still own the purchasing power in all industries. If you want to claim her purchasing power, own it and have her be loyal to you. You have to find a way to share with her, to communicate to her that you [00:38:00] are doing good in the world or in society in one way or another in addition to providing a product and service to her and then she will invest her money and she will typically even spend more money if she knows that it's going to do good.
Kyle Davis: Yeah. The she-economy is a real thing. Whether it is a female or male, if someone does feel like they're doing the right thing or it's just the right solution or the right product or they like you, people don't [00:38:30] mind to spend more money. They just want to make sure that what they're doing makes them feel good.
My information may be out of date so I want to make sure that when we do talk about the she–economy, should the word be market cap or impact on the market place, how much is determined based off of what the she-economy really pushes out?
Jackie Freiberg: Well, the she-economy [00:39:00] is a $28 trillion economy. That speaks volumes. She owns and controls over 85% of the purchases in this country alone. Let's just talk about the United States, we can go international but she owns 65 plus percent of the purchasing power that goes on internationally as well.
She is multidimensional, she is [00:39:30] multigenerational, she is multi anything and everything, she is the person to get to know and to grow loyalty with because if you serve her well and gain her loyalty, she will be your blessing. If you don't, she can be and will be your blood bath because she is online and she owns the blogosphere as well.
Kyle Davis: And boy, do [00:40:00] they. I'm thinking about, I don't want to name the company, but I'm thinking of like one of those famous rideshare companies where you dial up a driver.
If you're not protecting the females who are using your product far more than anybody else anyways, you're setting yourself up for failure.
Jackie Freiberg: Yeah, yeah, yeah. If you don't serve her well or if you do [00:40:30] somehow misrepresent her or if you ignore her, oftentimes, she will let you know by holding on tight to her purchasing power and not only that but she'll tell her friends and she'll tell her family and she'll tell her colleagues and her community. I like to say look, if you're recruiting her, if you're marketing to her, if you're selling to her, [00:41:00] if you simply live with her, you better understand her because she's huge.
Kyle Davis: Man, I feel like I need to have a lesson in this. I mean, I get it but I need …
Jackie Freiberg: We'll do another podcast …
Kyle Davis: We need another podcast.
Jackie Freiberg: This is one of my favorite topics. I do a lot of work in the she-economy and interestingly enough, a lot of people just don't … they don't even recognize it. They think they do but there's so much to learn in terms of marketing and [00:41:30] really gaining her loyalty.
Kyle Davis: To wrap this up and put a pretty little bow on it, I do want to invite you back for another podcast so I think that's going to be fun. In all these books that you've written with Kevin, you're talking about … You know what, I don't want to steal your words but I'll prime you a little bit. You mentioned that you talk about the best places. What is this theme and this [00:42:00] idea that each one of the books hits on so you know people know that, yeah, there's Nuts!, go buy it and yes, there's Cause!, go buy it and we're going to provide links on those on the website.
What else are you finding from the other books that you have out there?
Jackie Freiberg: Well, thank you for that. Our whole mission in the writing that we do and then the speaking that we do and in all the consulting work, it's really working with the best companies that actually want to hire the best people to do their [00:42:30] best work to make their corner of the world better, so it's best places, best people, best work, better world.
We've certainly written about companies that are truly recognized as best places where the best people do want to do their best work and they do make the world better.
There're also some books in between Nuts! and Cause!, like Be a Person of Impact, Do Something Now, and Boom, and those are all books that [00:43:00] really give individual contributors either seven decisions or choices that they can make on a daily basis to improve their contributions. Do Something Now is really about being the change that you want to see in your organization, in your life or in your world and then Be a Person of Impact is about really building a really powerful brand personally so it's POI, [00:43:30] be a person of impact and literally own your future.
We give 12 different strategies for building a better brand by how you land on people, that's what impact is. When you land on someone, you can land on someone positively which is a good thing, negatively which isn't so good and then questionably. So many of us, when we land on people, the way we land on them, the way we respond to them or don't is questionable in the hearts and minds of people around us and when our impact [00:44:00] is questionable, guess what, our brand slowly but surely begins to go in the downward trajectory, not the upward trajectory.
We've got to be super conscious of our contributions. We like to say that a culture of an organization is as much the will of the people as it is the will of the senior most leaders. With that said, you need to equip your people with the tools and resources that they need to have positive impact [00:44:30] within their organizations, within your businesses.
Kyle Davis: One of these quotes that I saw recently, I'm forgetting where, but it was talking about you're saying how you land on people and things can be questionable and there's this beautiful quote that ties into it but it's just a little bit different. It goes something like this, leave a mark and not a scar. Then if you think about that, very few scar stories are ever [00:45:00] good stories. They're always the result of something negative.
Jackie Freiberg: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's good.
Kyle Davis: Cool. I have so much we could talk about but I feel like if we did this this will be a three-hour mega long podcast and we just keep going so we'll have to do another one of these.
Jackie Freiberg: Let's do it.
Kyle Davis: Yeah, we'll definitely set it up. With that being said, if you want to book Jackie, Jackie and Kevin, or Kevin, you can do so by contacting [00:45:30] GDA Speakers at 214-420-1999 or visiting gdaspeakers.com. For today's transcript and all seven books which the list is too long to read and my eyes are too shut. You can purchase those books on gdapodcast.com where you will be able to find the transcript and everything else from today's podcast.
So, thanks Jackie.
Jackie Freiberg: Thanks Kyle. This has been fun so we'll do it again, have a great evening.
Kyle Davis: Hey, you too.