Practicing Divergent Thinking from the Front Porch to Save Humanity

0:00 The topics and opinions expressed in the following show are solely those of the hosts and their guests and not those of W Forcy Radio. It's employees are affiliates. We make no recommendations or endorsements radio show programs, services, or products mentioned on air or on our web. No liability, explicit or implied shall be extended to W forcy Radio or its employees are affiliates. Any questions or comments should be directed to those show hosts. Thank you for choosing W FORCY Radio. What's Working on Purpose? Anyway? Each week we ponder the answer to this question. People ache for meaning and purpose at work, to contribute their talents passionately and know their lives really matter. They crave being part of an organization that inspires them and helps them grow into realizing their highest potential.

0:45 Business can be such a force for good in the world, elevating humanity. In our program, we provide guidance and inspiration to help usher in this world we all want Working on Purpose. Now here's your host, Doctor Release Cortez. Welcome back to Working on Purpose program. Thanks turning in this week. Great to have you. I have been proudly hosting the show since February of twenty eighteen, so as of this recording us about eight and a half years. I am your host, Doctor at Last Quartez. If we have not met yet, I'm a management consultant specializing in meeting and purpose, organizational bogle, therapist, speaker and author. My team and I at Elist Cortez and Associates help companies to enlighten and fortify their operations by articulating their purpose and building inspirational leaders and cultures activated by meeting and purpose to turn those companies from a flatline EKG to a vibrant destination workplace. There people are intransfically motivated to perform at their best, grown at their fuller potential, and are committed to stay and help deliver on the company's mission. You can learn more about us and how we can work together at a last Cortez dot com. Now for today's program with us is doctor Robert Lengel, who began his career designing jet and rocket proposition systems and bandered through fluid computer design and industrial sales, a stint on Wall Street time and environmental think tank academics, consulting, and now writing today he is a Sociate Professor emeritus at the University of Texas at San Antonio and president of his consulting firm, Leader Work, Inc. Is the author of a few books, the latest one being A Place for Tea, Giving voice to the tortoise of our in our hair brained world, which we'll be

2:19 talking about today. Bob, A very hearty welcome to working on Purpose. Thanks for having me at least great So very welcome. I love it when I get to inadvertently cross paths with people I wouldn't otherwise, maybe meet and then read their amazing books cover to cover, of this one being yours, look at this beautiful thing you made, and then talk about them on air. I love that. So I'm happy to meet you and have you on And as I mentioned, I thought that I would DV a little bit from this usual program, which is really meant to be quite educational. I try to teach from the book but also inspire and I want to get into the spirit of your book, Bob. So first I'm just going to get that as a teaser to our listeners and viewers. I've been listening to this for a while. They're going to wonder, what are we going to do?

3:04 Here. But first week, before we get into that, I do want to talk about where this book came from, what urged you to write it. This is no small undertaking of what you did here. No, it wasn't. I don't know where to start with this. I wrote this book during the COVID shutdown, and largely it was a time where my consoling work, which was mostly face to face, got shut down totally. I can relate, Yes, yeah, So I had a Facebook group from my last book, The Front Porch Revolution, and I posted to it daily with essays. And so after a year, I realized that four hundred pages of text written on various subjects that I haven't really played much with during my career.

3:54 Most of my career focused on business environment because I was in business school thirty two years. But my work listening to the news and watching what was going on in the world when the whole world slowed down a little bit, really inspired me to think back to where I came from and what I was really trying to write as a life story. That's where the book came from. You know, I don't know, you know, I was thinking about Kirky Guard once said that life's lived forwards and understood backwards. And so this gave me a time to literally sit on a rocking chair and look back to the pieces that were the seats for this book, and they go look back and I the first thing that came to mind that when I was in junior high school, I did a book report on Ray Bradberry's Fahrenheit four fifty one and it was I don't know why it hit me at the time. It was kind of a young guy just trying to get a project out of the way in school. But the book stayed with me my entire life, and I've reread it multiple times because it was a prophecy about a day that would come that we'd have a dystopian society where the spirit and I know you're interested in meaning and purpose, but to me, that's all wrapped up in the spirit well being alive, the way you control people, which is what that society

5:27 was trying to do that Bradbury wrote about. He gave us a recipe to do it. Keep people busy, which is a universal disease right now. I mean, just try to get four people together for a meeting for a couple hours and see how long it takes to schedule it. And the second thing which was intriguing was to eliminate front porches on houses. And that really bothered me because I grew up in a small town in Pennsylvania where all the houses had big, old front porches, and they were really the place where the immunity had a heartbeat. People would get in those steps, share stories. Everybody knew everybody. And then I reflected back to where I lived today, or I did live until three years ago, in a development, not a community here in San Antonio, where they build the houses without front porches, and all the places where we would meet and converse would be behind the houses, behind privacy fences. And those privacy fences and those conversation places behind houses are the inspiration for all my work. We don't meet in the commonplace anymore, where everybody has an equal opportunity to feel like they belong. So this book is about the fate of spirit in a busy world and the fate of our front porches. Oh my gosh, cop, so many things to talk about there. So what, of course you do talk about that all of that in your book, which I really appreciate it. So I feel like I feel like I really I know you, I know who you are as a human being, and I love that when I can access my guests

7:00 like that. So so beautiful at the way that you shared too. I think it's interesting. I also crafted books during the pandemic. We had time, I had time to sit and reflect, and it was a big, you know, collective, collective breath that we took across the whole world. So it's interesting to me. There's lots of things that we could talk about of what came out of that collective breath. So many changes and elevations and how people think and feel. Your notion of from the front Porch, and even the way you talk about where people meet and the lighting in which they do so is fascinating. Bob, I really really got so much out of that. So the idea too at the front porch, and you talk about abundance versus scarcity in those moments, and so I think it would be good for us, just like you do in the book, to let our listeners and viewers in invite them in to sit with us on that front porch, because, as you say, there's a very different view from that front porch that affords very different perspectives and elicits very different conversations. Yeah, it's not only just the perspective, but we change in those places. And the book I talk about going taking my executive NBA classes to Europe and going through the great cathedrals. When you walk into those buildings, you change, and they're very different than walking into the boxes that we put up overnight now in the big cities to do business. There's a utility to the places we built these days, and there's a beauty to the places those cathedrals represent. One thing

8:33 about the cathedrals is they're all bigger than they need to be. They're all more artistically our innate than they need to be. Stained glass windows, statues, things that just cost money and take endless time to build. But they're more about They used to be more about who we were as beings and identity than the buildings today, which are more about utility. So I think the places are very important part of this book. We change in those places. I completely agree with that, and I liked what you also said when you were talking about these beautiful European buildings, you said they reflect that what they valued, which was beauty and legacy and magnificence, instead of what we see today, which is more about efficiency and practicality. I have to say from that vantage point, just as a small a side pet peeve like you've, you're mourning the loss of the front porches, I'm mourning the loss of actual materials beyond aluminum sighting for new homes. Could we please stop that? I know it's very practical, but could we please stop that? Well? The cathedrals, what they represent to me are things that are not necessary and impractical, and those tend to be the things that give human beings meeting. So what I did in my book is has looked at the tension between the busy world where we're human doings and the front porch world, where we're human beings.

10:11 And when we're in conference rooms, we're surrounded by things that have been created by our heads, and we're all different. In fact, we value ourselves by our utility of how different are We cannot be different than somebody else, And on front porches, especially when we're sitting there watching the sunrise or at night and looking at the night sky together, we're not different. We're all And the voices that come out of the front porch, when we lose them, we're losing part of our humanity. And to me, when I look at meaning and purpose and what this program is about, the I read man search for Meaning when I was in junior high school also and Victor frank idea of being able to almost create a place of beauty even in a concentration camp. Can do it in the worst places, and some of people who I know out there in the workplace feel like they're imprisoned and they've real sad part about it to me is I find so many people who don't have dreams anymore about their work. They've been so unculturated in living in those boxes that are all about efficiency and practicality and not the things that are extra that make us different from animals. Does that make sense? Yes? And so I talk about this and probably at least one of my books, and that what

11:41 I've kind of come to on that notion, Bob, when you say the gloss their dreams for work, I think it's also across their whole entire lives. When I'm out speaking oftentimes about passion, inspiration and purpose, at some point of my talk, usually fairly early on, I asked the crowd, what are you passionate about? And then I watch the responses as they try to conjure something in return, and I realized in that one moment, as I watched the sea of faces register that they don't have an answer to the question. They don't know what they're passionate about. And that's what I know I needed. Well, the other part of this I go in classes, and the first thing I stand in front of a class, I asked them, what are your questions? And they stare back at me like that, yes, yes, indeed, indeed, I loved by their way. You're a section on creating asking beautiful questions and the humanity that comes with that.

12:31 Before we get into that, I think it's important for our listeners and viewers who haven't read the book as I have, I think we need to introduce and distinguish the Hair and the Tortoise, if you would. Yeah, that was sort of a late tagline to what I was writing. I want to be creative. I'm so used to writing articles that go into scientific magazines, and my two previous books didn't have characters in them except for me. So The Tortoise and the Hair, the classic ASoP fable was a story about the slow and steady winning the race in life that the hair is fast and clever and the tortoise is slow and steady, but at the end of the race, the tortoise wins. In my version, we're in a competition between our heads and how we think, and our intellect and our hearts, which represent and carry our spirit of who we are as human beings. And we've evolved at two different levels. If you think about I reflected in the book on the things that I experienced with technology, but if you go way back to the cave days and human beings, the tortoise and the hair had an opportunity to talk to each other. When we were creating something or building something.

13:52 There was always a conversation, Okay, here's what we're going to do and how we do it, but also how we want to beat doing it. Who who are we trying to become as human beings. It was connected in the early days before all the technology came on. But as this race between the tortoise and the hair evolved, our heads have gone to the moon. I mean, we've gone into worlds of nanoseconds and megatons, But inside, as we are a human beings on the front porch, we haven't changed at all. Basically, we have the same people who have the fears about our own mortality, who worry about feelings and get get hateful, and anger and love all those things are the same. But what happens when our heads get so far ahead of our hearts that we don't leave a place for a vote tortoise And I name the tortoise Tea. So the book title is a place for Tea. How to find a place in our hair brained world, to give a place for Tea, give him a voice. And so if you think about the way we meet these days, Tea isn't welcome in conference room because it takes time to talk about our feelings and our stories and all the things that he would want to talk about that make us common. We just want to get down and be efficient, stick to an agenda, get to takeaways, and move on. But what's coming really interesting, at least right now, it's all the problems I hear people talking about relate to tortoise issues,

15:24 air issues, the things that about changing cultures. For example, that's a tortoise game that's not an air game. And we're trying to change cultures with our thinking and not our feeling We're trying to change and move the furniture on the stage with our intellects, but the people they don't change that fast, and so there's a very different approach to this. And I think you can change cultures in a couple of days if you give tea a voice, and if you don't, you're not going to change cultures period. You're speaking my love language, bomb, be careful, you're going to get right into my heart. Let's let our listeners and viewers reflect on that while we grab our first break. I'm your host, Doctor Elise Cortez. We're on Near with doctor Robert Lingel who is the author of A Place for Tea, Giving Voice to the tortoise in our hair brained world. We've been talking a bit about where this book came from and why it's important. After the break, we're going to we're going to get into one of his key concepts, which is the importance of divergent thinking stake works. We'll be right back. Doctor Elise Cortez is a management consultant specializing in meaning and purpose. An inspirational speaker and author, she helps companies visioneer for a greater purpose amongst stakeholders and develop purpose inspired leadership and meaning infused cultures that elevate fulfillment, performance, and commitment

16:59 within the workforce. To learn more or to invite a lease to speak to your organization, please visit her at Elise Cortez dot com. Let's talk about how to get your employees working on purpose. This is working on Purpose with doctor Elise Cortez. To reach our program today or to open a conversation with a lease, send an email to a lease Ali se at Elise Cortez dot com. Now back to working on purpose. Thanks for saying with us, and welcome back to working on Purpose. I'm your host, doctor Elise Cortez, as I am also dedicated to helping to create a world where people realize our potential at work and they're led by inspirational leaders that help them find and contribute their greatness, and we do business of vetters the world. I keep researching and writing my own books. So one of my latest books, which came out in March of twenty three, is called The Great Revitalization. How activating meeting and purpose can radically enliven your business, which helps leaders understand what today's workforce wants and then offers twenty one best practices to equip them to provide it through their leadership and culture. You can learn more about my books and how to work with me at at least corotest dot com, and you can check out Amazon as well for them if you are just now joining us.

18:14 My guest is doctor Robert Lingo, who is the Associate Professor Emeritus at the University of Texas at San Antonio and president of his consulting from leader Work, Inc. He's the author of A Place for Tea giving voice to the tortoise and our hair brained world. So I hope our listeners and viewers got a chance to be able to settle into themselves as I continue to do as I read your book and have a conversation with you, because next to I want to situate one of the most key concepts in your book, at least from what I could tell, and that's the notion of developing divergent thinking. So if you could, if you could talk a little bit about what is divergent thinking and why is it important? Well, there are a number of ways I could approach it, and maybe I'll approach with a tortoise and air thetise.

19:03 The book is about the fate of spirit. And I do something interesting, at least at the beginning of almost every program in every class I run, and that is to give people journals, sit them in a circle and ask them to make two lists. One list is the things that give them spirit in their work, and the second list is things that kill it or diminish it. And I've done this in hundreds and hundreds of groups, all the way from high school students to senior teams in Washington, and I always get the same results. The things that give people spirit. They all know what gives them spirit, and meaning is part of it. Doing something that's bigger than themselves, having a voice, being respected, being trusted, having a healthy culture that's safe. I could go on and on, but everybody knows what gives them spirit and they all agree to it, no matter what they're doing. When I go to the kill spirit side, bureaucratic red tape and nonsensical rules, things that make them feel like they're in a straight jacket and can't be themselves, an unsafe environment, lack of voice, work that seems meaningless and purposeless, and you could go on and on and after.

20:21 What I do is go around the circle and have each person give one thing on each list, and I have a graphic reporter record that works with me, and I have two walls filled with paper list those things. So they sit between these walls of spirit and no Spirit. And the question I asked them next is which wall represents your workplace? And I've never had any workplace tell me it wasn't the no Spirit wall. It's universal. And then the question that starts my program is, well, if we all agree what spirit is, and we all agree we want to in spirit, why do we collaborate to create environments that leave us without spirit? And so that's the entry to this. The tortoise carries the spirit and the hair carries the thinking about the spirit. And so if you have things at the spirit level like trust, convergent thinking, which is the opposite of divergent thinking, takes trust and to create in words where we can think about it, it becomes contracts, and we live in contracts, and the spirit of trust disappears. You take morality and the spirit of morality in those values. When they get intellectualized in the hair brain thinking, they become laws. And so we live in the spirit that we live in the letter of the law. And we lose the spirit of the morality behind it. And you could go on and on.

21:53 Organizations are living cultures, but when the hairbrain starts to think about it, we reduce them convergently to org charts and job descriptions. And that's what we do to human beings too. They hold human beings at the tortoise level. When we think about them at the hair brain level, we reduce them to job descriptions. So i'mbody, ask you who you are, I'm vice president of finance. I'm not so and so, so our resume is start is written by our hair brains, and our legacies are written by the tortoise. And we don't have any time anymore to put time into the legacy stories.

22:36 That's the story in the book. Divergent Thinking takes us from the contracts back to trust. It takes us from the from the laws back to the spirit behind the laws of the morality, and from the ORG charts back to the culture. And so you can you can go on and on and from the job description back to the human being. I take that vice president out of the conference room, put them around a campfire by a lake, and that human being comes to life and you talked about lighting these spaces. After I do that, spirit, no spirit check in. It's so fascinating that the next conversation is about candlelight and flashlight. These are sophisticated people with multible degrees, and now I'm introducing them to candlelight and flashlight conversation. And I asked them to list in their journals the qualities of candlelight and the qualities of flashlight.

23:34 And when they finish that exercise, I put those on the opposite walls too. And the spirit lines up with candlelight. Candle light is soft, it's inviting, it's eternal, it's mysterious, it's all the things that capture the spirit of human beings. The flashlight is distant, it's cold, it's technical. The flashlight represents the lighting in the conference room. That candlelight represents the light lighting under on the evening sky. Is sitting on the front porch, and the tortoise carries the candlelight and the hair uses flashlight to see the world. And if the tortoise moves too fast, the flame blows out.

24:22 But what's interesting, when we're almost so much about change these days, that the change when the biggest moments of change in our lives are when involve our mortality. The loss of a loved one is a huge change. Yes, the shooting at you know, the horrors like the shooting at Uvaldi, which is about thirty or forty miles from here in San Antonio. That was a horror. And what's interesting to me at the days after it, and I think in nine to eleven, and I remember the days right after nine to eleven that stopped the world and we stopped flying, and everything's slowed down, and people started to think differently. How did they meet. They didn't meet in conference rooms. They met around music and poetry and candle light. Yes, and which is how the tortoise, What the tortoise brings into our lives.

25:19 If we want big change, and we want to change ourselves, we look better in candle light to each other. I definitely am going to be requesting candle light for my next date, for sure, because you said I look better in candle light. So I'm going to set that up. Thanks Bob, who has romantic flashlight dinners, I don't know or even just horrible regularly your artificial light dinners. Thank you very much. So what it's wonderful about this conversation and why I am so delighted to have you on this program, Bob Is I think that the work that you're putting forth is exactly what's necessary to be able to take the world of work where it needs to go next. We have an opportunity right now after not just after COVID and the pandemic and what gave people the opportunity to pause their lives and consider what do I really want from my life and my work? What am I willing to tolerate and not tolerate, and how much am I willing to accept for pay to do all that? Everybody there was a lot of consideration for that.

26:18 And now the workforce, we have an empowered workforce that is really leading the charge here. And now what we're finding, of course is leaders are really and trying to figure out, well, how do I address this? What do I do here? It's a perfect opportunity to reinvent how work gets done, where it gets where it gets done, and how we do it together. And that's definitely a big part of the work that I'm out to do in the world. So I'd be learning from someone like you and adding those ideas into what I keep learning each week is just critical. So I see your work as a way to help us create the healthy path, to restore us back to humanity, back to a wholeness in ourselves. So I want to talk a little bit about how some of these concepts, you know how, because I know some of these people are listening to the shows like this is all amazing, and what do I do with this? I want?

27:11 I know, of course, we want the tortoise to get them to think and let it work through their minds, hearts and souls, and let's help them connect the dots just a little yeah, they you know. I have I presented in the book a cloud also, and that is that when the tortoise and the hair the beginning of our evolution, they were together and talk together. But when the hair adapted technology to aid its thinking, things started to speed up and getting more complex, and the hair still took care of the tortoise because we created with our thoughts structures that slowed the world down so we could still be in them. That's the root of aureaucracy, that's the root of structures. That's the root of rituals and traditions and culture. Fascinating.

28:04 We thought about how we could clothe slow the world down so the courtis could still breathe and be part of the conversation. But I'll tell you what I talk in the book about it the technology being a little tiger cub and when we adapted it early on, it was cute and cuddly. But we've been feeding it and it's been growing, and it's growing to the point now where I want to put a question mark over all. This is whether or not the tiger wants to be in this race anymore. And that's the birth of artificial intelligence. And what's happening. All the structures in economic theory are best in economic theory that we don't have time during the day to talk about everything, so we substitute things like authority and struck. That's slow thing down.

28:55 And human beings are only capable of processing very small amounts information when it comes right down to it. Do you know what the random axis memory the human brain is. Well, I'm sitting in my office here. I have a computer on my credenza that my parents gave me when I was a junior in high school. Think about that. Does the thing still run? Yeah? But it's not anything like a computer you would recognize. It's just a bunch of wires and relays and switches. The random axis memory was twenty eight bits, you know, one, two, three, four or five access memory. In my smartphone, I can get gigabytes and we talk terabytes. We don't even know what that means anymore. But the random access memory of the human brain, what we can hold in consciousness in the moment, is about seven bits. And in order to think about those bits, we have to boot what we were thinking about. So we can't capture ourselves the least by thinking about it. And that's why we work, and that's why purpose is so important, because we work to take the candle flame I think is a mirror of our consciousness. That's why it's so mysterious to us, because we can't catch that either. But why do people sculpt or write books?

30:11 Why do they want to see themselves in their work? Because they can't see themselves in their consciousness, so they want something that has some temporal stability to it. So the whole idea of purpose. People are inspired to work if they can see themselves and learn about themselves in the process. But too often we've created structures that have gone extreme to try to control people to do precisely what we want them to do, and we value them for your utility and not for their uniqueness. So I just wanted to get that in because I think what's happening now is the way computers are going their capacities, and we're going to have biological computers and quantum computers coming right up on the horizon, and with artificial intelligence, it is just a matter of time before those machines develop a consciousness. And I've been writing invited articles about my book that are all related to artificial intelligence now because they invalidate the assumptions on which all structures have been thought through with our hair brains, we don't need them anymore, Oh my gosh. I think the challenge, at least is this work on meaning and purpose is fighting a bigger, uphill battle, and in the background is a shadow of whether or not the human species will have a purpose and a meaning, and we're all part of that species. I don't know.

31:44 I just like to keep that in the background because it makes for creative thinking to think about that, because it's not just about us individually anymore, but we're fighting an uphill battle to keep afloat m All right, let's let our listeners think about that as well. Let's give them some time, some tea time, shall we, bob as we take our last break Here, I'm your host, Doctor Elise Cortez. We've been on the air with doctor Robert Lingel who's the author of A Place for Tea, Giving Voice to the tortoise in our hair brained world. We've been talking a little bit about some of the concepts he discusses in the book, the importance of the virgin thinking on the importance of coming back to where we have stillness, and how we decide where we're meeting, what kind of light do we use in those meetings.

32:25 After the break, we're going to get into some comparison and thinking and contrast into how what we look through which pairs of glasses, the hair glasses or the tea glasses, what they actually illuminate. Stay with us, will be right back. Doctor Elise Cortez is a management consultant specializing and meaning and purpose. An inspirational speaker and author, she helps companies visioneer for greater purpose among stakeholders and develop purpose inspired leadership and meaning infuse cultures that elevate fulfillment, performance and commitment within the workforce. To learn more or to invite a lease to speak to your organization, please visit her at Elise Cortez dot com. Let's talk about how to get your employees working on purpose. This is working on Purpose with doctor Elise Cortez. To reach our program today or to open a conversation with Elise, send an email to Elise ali Se at Elise Cortez dot com. Now back to working on Purpose. Thanks for staying with us, and welcome back to working on Purpose. I'm your host, doctor Elise Cortez.

33:50 I mentioned too in the last break that I have a My latest book is called The Great Revitalization. It is for leaders and for business and for culture. So what I did to a company that is I created a short three page assessment and it's there on my website for you to be able to download. It's free. You can go to at Las Cortes dot com and then go to how do we help tab and you'll find that you'll find it there if you're just now joining us. My guest is doctor Robert Lingel He's the Associate Professor Emeritus at the University of Texas at San Antonio, the president of his consulting from Leader Work, Inc. And the author of a place for tea giving voice to the tortoise in our hair brained world. So for this last bit here, I think it would be amusing, entertaining and also uplifting to be able just to compare and contrast a little bit what it looks like when we have hair glasses on versus tortoise glasses. Where shall we start?

34:43 Ambiguity? I love it. Okay, you know my first two college degrees, we're an aerospace engineering and you can talk about hair brained world and being but everything was the idea was to be precise, and the idea communications was always to make sure that whatever message you're sending is received in an objective sense. Think about how we teach managers and NBA programs communication. I don't want to communicate to a bunch of people and have any ambiguity about it if I'm trying to give directions. But there's a whole part of organization that is silent if we do that. And I think that there's a chapter in there called t risk, where it's the risk of what's not being said and not being heard in organizations, and often that's the t voice that speaks with the value of ambiguity. I think about intelligence at three levels, and my co author would hate me to go into this. She hates when I do it, but I love it. And you know, for there's three kinds of intelligence we're playing with here. It's the intelligence on the mountaintop that has no frame and everything's just there without thinking. That's a spiritual intelligence. When we come off the mountaintop, we pick up binoculars and we essentially have a choice

36:14 as to where we point those binoculars. Those are our questions. So the kinds of questions we ask determine the kind of world we see. And if we ask convergent questions that seek answers, we bring our world down to be something smaller. If we ask what you call beautiful questions, we open up the world to something that's better. Well, the things that appear on that middle stage are about aesthetics. The choice is to where to point those is an information base. It's aesthetic base. What do we find attractive or beautiful? And when we point the binoculars in that direction, the next thing we do is we bring in the hair brain, and we that little central control we turn to get the pictured to be absolutely clear and precise. So we take the trust that's beautiful and we reduce it to something that's very clear in contracts, and that's how we do it. But when we think of vision statements and inviting people to be part of something, when we communicate, the ambiguity is critically important. And the story I tell in the book as a story about my grandfather, and we lived in a small town in Pennsylvania when I grew up, and my grandfather had one of the very first TV sets, and that thing he'd sit in the living room and it had rabbit ear antennas. Most of my younger your younger listeners probably don't even know what they are. But we only had so many shows on it, and most of

37:44 the time was just a test pattern. But when a show did come on, like on a Sunday night, he would tune those rabbit ears till we got a clear picture. And then the rest of my family would sit around there, mesmerized by the magic of what was coming on that screen. But he disappeared into the kitchen, turn off the lights and listen to radio dramas in the old days, there were a lot of interesting things on the radio that people paid attention to, and he was used to that. And as a young kid, I walked in and said, why didn't you come in and watch the pictures. They're so beautiful and so clear, And he said, I think the pictures on the radio are clearer to me than they are on the TV. And I took that to heart because I said, what are you talking about. The TV leaves nothing to the imagination. His pictures were clear because his imagination created them to create the characters and setting in the place, and books are one step past that where they invite the imagination.

38:45 They invite the reader, the listener to be part of something, not separate from it. And to me, that's what poetry is and the arts is. They leave holes. There are a language with holes in it where invites us, our t to get into that picture and be part of it. So it's not the objective communication that we won, but it's this subjective space we want people to be in. Wed I was part of a team at the university a number of years ago where they were trying to write a vision statement. I always hate being invited to those groups because you get eight academics trying to write a paragraph to agree to, and we we wound up with these uninspiring vision statements that we're almost a page along with footnotes academics, and we were frustrated. We've been gone on months for this and we couldn't come down to it. And one day at a meeting that we were just about ready to throw it in, the door opened and one of our vice presidents walked in with a guest. That guest was mya Angelin. Oh my gosh, she oh, yes, you do talk about this. She had friends in San Antonio often came down walk the river walk, and so she came out to the university and she knew about the university and she looked at us and says, what do we all do? And we're writing a vision statement?

40:09 And then she's asked how's it going, And we all had a break up because it wasn't going very well at all. She said, well, I'm sorry to hear that, but you know, keep up the good work. And then she started to walk out, and one of my colleagues asked her, miss Angelou, what do you think the vision is for this university? Now you've got to understand that we live in a multicultural community down here of almost fifty percent of the population of Morris Hispanic, and we lived in this culture all the time, and a lot of first time people going to school, so we weren't getting the traditional student that most schools do, and nobody knew about us. We were a new school. When I came to UTSA in nineteen eighty two, there were five thousand students. Now they're at thirty five thousand. Recognize Maya without skipping of the said I think you're a rainbow in the clouds. And she left and that was beautiful. That's what we were, a rainbow of colors. But people couldn't see us in the cloud Unfortunately. Our hair brain's got to work on that and by the time we were finished with it, it became two paragraphs that we published in the graduate catalog, and nobody saw the rainbow in the clouds. So I think ambiguity is such an important tool. Is don't make vision statements clear. Make them ambiguous with holes in them so people can get inside of them and be

41:43 part of it. But like the radio program, not the TV, and be inspired by them, be enlarged by them. Yes, Oh, my goodness, that was ambiguity versus T's precision. Yes, indeed, I would love for us if we can to distinguish the hair glasses of motivation versus the ti glasses of inspiration. We know I have to ask about that. Well, the hair brained world creates external structures that invite actions through incentives, and that's pretty much what I call management work, and where incentives are used to motivate people. Right, the tortoise lights the fire inside, and it lights the candle flame on our bellies, and so that's leaders inspire. They get people to act through inspiration. And it's interesting because I think inspiration requires that we have places where we can be ourselves completely and experiment to find out who we might become, and the incentives sometimes drive that away. So, if you think about it, the pay when we're paid to do something, the pay is compensation for a piece of artis place, and so the more you get paid, quite often, the more they're buying of your inspiration. And so the most sometimes the place where we have the most inspired people are places

43:16 where they don't get paid at all, where they're working for habitat for humanity or the project I had at utsa where the kids work for pediatric cancer family no pay. It's all about an invitation to service, to open up. And that's the difference I think between the inspiration and the leader work and the motivation, which is management work. And the reason leadership is much a huge challenge. You know, have done research to look at the effects of leadership programs and organizations, and the top level the c suite people want to change their organization. That's why they're investing in leadership. But the programs that focus on individual leaders have not led to organizational impacts, and they're almost universally dissatisfying to the people who are investing them. And so it's again it's we're leaving no place they can go out and inspire their tea at a beautiful program.

44:17 And some of the programs on leadership for individuals are incredible, they're inspiring, they're well received, they're well evaluated. But if they come back to an organization that is all external, hair brained and they have no place to practice that, it sometimes is actually a negative because I'm inspired to do all this and I try it and my boss won't let me do it, or there's no place by the way, Bob, what's fascinating about what you said earlier about the three kinds of intelligence? That aligns extremely well with the last three chapters of my book, The Great Revivialization, where I put forth those twenty one best practices and I organize them around intellectual quotient intelligence IQ intelligence, logical rational EQ, emotional intelligence, kind of issues of carrying esthetic qualities, and spiritual intelligence. It's so what you're talking about in different parlance has very much aligned and found its way into into my heart, my mind and my work.

45:21 That, by the way, is one of the things that was really inspiring to me when I thought about my work during the COVID shutdown, and that is that the dissonance we had people during the shutdown was the twenty twenty election, and there were fights in grocery stores, people putting up their political signs, neighbors who couldn't talk to each other anymore, the hate field rhetoric we're seeing in Washington. All that stuff drove me that there's got to be something better. And so there's an analysis of dissonance in the book that it comes at two levels. The dissonance we normally think about is intellectual dissonance where there's also an esthetic dissonance about what we like or don't like that has nothing to do with information or truth or logic. And for example, there's no truth in the color blue, and you might you like red and I like blue. If we argue about that, we go nowhere. On the other hand, it's a language thing. If we differ about something like gun control, where you're in favor of gun rights and unlimited and you live in Texas, after all, you have to be, and on the other side, you want total gun control, we'll argue with our hair brains till we don't like each other anymore, and we'll live with separate silos for the rest of our lives. But if I show you an ambiguous painting or an ambiguous poem

46:52 or an ambiguous piece of music, you might like it or not like it, but it's not true one way or the other. But we won't disagree, because beauty is in the eye the beholder. The language of the arts. The ambiguous languages are open and accepting a diversity naturally without emotion. So what I do in creating meeting places where there's a lot of disagreement is I don't work and hare's intellectual language at all. I go almost immediately to image your music or poetry. People understand the likes and dislikes you might You might almost agree with me, but not like the way I say it, and that will create dissonance, so you won't listen to me. I hate to give you up. This is so beautiful, and yet we found our way to the end of the show, and everything that you have said, I've as you can see, I'm hanging on your words. You know, this show is listening to my people around the world that are interested in improving their experience of work, and that in changing and elevating the way that we actually lead people. What would you like to leave them today? You know, I think I don't have five bullet points. The book isn't like that.

48:07 I can leave them with two things that they have been ringing in layers my entire life. When is a quote I've created from my own old website. The only real tragedy in life is to have something special inside of you the world will never see. That's one and the other one is don't sell your dreams for a salary. And I you know we've somehow we've become slaves to an economic engine that we have to feed more and more. And I know people who believe they don't have a choice but to do things that are economically practical, that they have a choice to go down and pay more for gas because the person who owns that station donates to the food bank. So I'm hair brain thinking is essentially on a thinking of scarcity, and that's economics, and the tortoise is more into the humanities and the arts. Beautiful way to finish, Bob. I'm very very agreeable to know you to have read your book, to check with my listeners and viewers, and I look forward to staying in touch and sitting on the front porch with you and under candle light if we can, or any candle light if we can. You have an open invitation. You're not that far away. Thank you. Take it up, all right, listeners and viewers. If you'll learn more about Bob his work at Leader of Work, Inc. Or his books, you can just start by going a place fort dot com. So that's a place for T the LETTERT dot com last week. If you missed the live show, you

49:38 can always catch it be a recorded podcast. We are on the Earth with Heather McGowan and Chris Shipley talking about their new book, The Empathy Advantage, Leading the Empowered Workforce, which I found to be incredibly eliminating of today's workforce wants and needs and what leaders need to be and do to attract, motivate and retain them. That their message actually very much aligned with mine and my latest book To Realization as well. Next week, we'll be on the air with Atigrafique talking about his book Decision Sprint, the New Way to innovate into the unknown and move from strategy to action. I've been reading this book for the last couple of weeks. It's actually very intense and extremely accessible. We'll be talking about it. We'll be talking about then next week. Remember that work as an integral, an important part of our lives. It can be one of the best inventors and means of realizing our potential and make any impact we crave. So let's work on Purpose. We hope you've enjoyed this week's program. Be sure to tune into Working on Purpose featuring your host, doctor Elise Cortez, each week on W four CY. Together, we'll create a world where business operates conscientiously. Leadership inspires and passion. Performance and employees are fulfilled in work that provides the meaning and purpose they crave. See you there.

50:49 Let's work on purpose.