The Promise of a “C-Suite” Education and its RX for Humanity 2nd episode

0:00 The topics and opinions express in the following show are solely those of the hosts and their guests and not those of W FOURCY 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 FOURCY Radio or its employees are affiliates. Any questions or comments should be directed to those show hosts. Thank you for choosing W FOURCY 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. Business can be such a force for good in the world, elevating humanity.

0:49 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 Elise Cortez. Welcome back to the Working on Purpose program, which has been brought to you with passion or pride since February of twenty fifteen. Thanks you Tonigan in this week. Great to have you. I am your host, doctor Elias Cortes. If we've not met before, you don't know me. I'm an organizational psychologist and logo therapist, speaker and author. My team and I at gusto Now help companies to enliven and fortify their operations by building a culture and leadership activated by meeting and purpose. Our mission is to help our clients create a destination workplace where people flock to join, are intrusively motivated to perform with their best, can grow to the floor potential, and are committed to stay and dinatically deliver on the company's mission, which translates to higher profits for you. You can learn more about us now. We can work together at gustodashnow dot com or my personal site at least Coortes dot com. Getting back into today's program we have with us today.

1:47 James W. Keyes a global business leader, philanthropist, educator, artist, musician, commercial rated pilot and modern renaissance man. He is the former CEO of two internationally recognized Fortune five hundred companies, both which you should recognize seven eleven in Blockbuster. He has had a lifel commitment to education, serving as a founding director of the Dallas Education Foundation, and he's the founder of the Education Is Freedom Foundation. He's the author of Education Is Freedom The Future Is in Your Hands, which we'll be talking about today again for a second time. He joins it today from Dallas. Jim, welcome back to Working on Purpose. Thank you. It's great to be back with you. So I got a confession for you. So, in the nine and a half years I've been hosting this podcast, Jim, I believe I've had people come back on the show, maybe under five or six times, but always to talk about another book. I believe you are the only guests that I've ever had on to come back and talk more about the first book that we were on about.

2:45 How's that for a distinction. Well, that's great, But you know, I'm afraid that it may have been because I was too I used up all the time. We didn't get through the book. But I think I maybe also contributed that I'm a little over zealous in how many topics I wanted to get out of you. So not to worry, but to kick us off for those guests and listeners who didn't actually hear yours, serior, the first time. I just want to situate just really, what a remarkable life that you have cultivated for yourself. Jim, you know the CEO of these two companies seven to eleven Blockbuster, being a philanthropist, a pilot, and artist and musician, among many other achievements.

3:26 And so what I love about that and what I want to celebrate is you really are a walking billboard for lifelong learning. So let's just start there. I do a lot of things, yeah, and it truly is what motivated in many ways the creation of the book. But it is my attempt to share with others a gift that I've been given, which is an ability to learn how to learn. And this gift is one it just keeps on giving because as I go through life, the more I can learn, the more interesting life becomes, just because whether it's learning how to paint or creating a piece of music or flying an airplane. It's just grateful every day for the opportunity to have new adventures that result from this very very simple ability to learn something that anyone can do.

4:28 Learning is free, Yes, And I have to say that there's got to be a catalyst there right, So and So one of the reasons I love doing this program Jim, and it's hopefully encouraging brothers, is I want to help ignite their desire to learn. I want to help increase their appetite for learning. So clearly something in you. And we did talk a little bit about your own upbringing in the last program, so we won't revisit it so people can go back and listen to that other one. But clearly you have You've got an insatial appetite to learn. So where does that come from? Yeah, I wish, I wish I knew. I think it was probably that I never gave up being a child.

5:15 That explains a lot, Jim. Okay, it kind of does. Yeah. In fact, if you were to talk to family members that they'd say, yeah, that's that's about right. But in all seriousness, if you think about it, we all grow up with an innate curiosity and desire to learn and just to ask why, and to want to take things apart and understand how they work, and and and we all grow up with an ability to be creative, which is is really the same thing as curiosity. It's just it's just taking that curiosity to another level. And and and and having fun with it, and and these are the things that many people lose as they get older, and for a whole host of reasons. But I think the culprit in many of us is insecurity fear those things that are caused by other people defining who we are.

6:12 So at some point we sang like are you know, like no one cared, and then someone probably said, well, oh that's you know, God cut it out, you know, or we we cray on the wall and our parents said, don't do that, bad boy. And those those negative influences that make you doubt yourself and your own ability to be curious or to be creative and just let it rip stay with us unfortunately, and some people let that happen. I think the difference with me. And I'll give you an example that someone said recently, they said, hey, we got to think outside of the box. And I said, well, thinking outside of the box, maybe we should learn outside of the box, because there really is no box, right, And I think that was the difference that I've never had a box. I've never let someone else define who I am by saying, oh, you're this. You know, you studied this, so that's what you are, or you're this kind of person or you're this demographic, So that's who you are, what you are. No, I'm whatever I want to be, and and there is no box the boxes in our head.

7:30 Well, I completely I completely agree with that, which is why I do a lot of work that I do inside of organizations. And we probably maybe that's the next book you got to work on, Jim is helping people to, you know, get rid of the boxes that society imposes on them. That might just be just like you need something else to do, but let me just and if your wife comes after me saying, at least you gave him this great idea and now he's off doing it. Yeah, the next book. Yeah, well okay, So what I want to do in this conversation Jim is I would love it if you could so. I love how your book is organized into those street parts what to learn, how to learn as the second part, and the third one is why to learn, And we didn't get to the third part. So can we quickly just sort of give a little bit of summation on what to learn and how to learn? And before we dive into the way to learn stuff?

8:17 Please sure? What to learn came? Actually it was an inspiration. Shortly after being named CEO of seven to eleven for the first time, I was having those self doubts. I was having those normal human instincts of am I good enough, am I smart enough? Et cetera. And I was fortunate to stumble on what I now freely call my gift. And it really occurred to me in the course of a dream that I think I went through in some detail on our last chat. But the idea was that I had this dream and I was told I was going to get this gift, and I woke up and I was all excited, and I wrote down these three words.

9:00 And when I stepped back from it and started to talk with friends and family about this gift that I was disappointed that I didn't get because I woke up too soon, they said, well, that is your gift. You know, you have three things that I've now characterized as what to learn. You have these three things. You have an ability to embrace change and to find even in negative change, something bad that happens, you're able to say, well, it happened for a reason, and I'm going to find out. I'm going to find the silver lining. And this there's got to be one in here somewhere. And then secondly you have confidence, the ability to have the courage to see it as an opportunity and to do something about it.

9:52 And then thirdly, you have an ability to have clarity, clarity of both inbound communications listening and then outbound communications in the form of ultimately simplification, the ability to take very complex things and break them into simple terms. So those three things change. Confidence and clarity, Jim, are your gift. And by the way, in your dream, you were supposed to share this gift with others. And so that's what I'm doing, and I've done it my whole career. I shared it with my team at seven to eleven and at Blockbuster, and I've shared it with thousands of students over the years. And now I've put it in a book and I'm sharing it in the form of what to learn before you even progress to how to learn or why to learn?

10:44 Beautifully done beautifully. It's a hopefully it's a gift that everyone can can can use and then and then give to others as well. Okay, so that's what to learn. I also loved how you described how to learn. I thought I was very christ so you can summarize that as well. Sure, the first element of how to learn is critical thinking, and it's something that this is something we all learn in grade school. You know, the Socratic method, the scientific method, but the ability to truly dig in and and use data, use knowledge facts to make decisions to form opinions. And then the ability I love there's an expression that Aristotle had that true intelligence is the ability to entertain a thought without to go to entertain a thought without accepting the thought yes, yes, yes, yeah, and and and it's genius and it's so relevant to what we're doing today when we have this social media magic that allows us to entertain all these thoughts but we accept them as fact rather than whether than engage our own critical thinking to challenge those thoughts and to make sure we have the facts behind them. So critical thinking is the first and the second is curiosity. And that's what fuels critical

12:15 thinking because if you just scanning the Internet and you take things at face value and you're not curious. You're curious enough to want to scan the Internet, that's curiosity at work, but then you're not curious enough to dig deeper to say, oh, that's interesting, I wonder if that's true, let me find out and then maybe take a Google search and find out the facts behind that meme that was so cute. That's curiosity. And then uh, the final of the how to Learn is creativity, which I've I mentioned in the previous session that Einstein called it intelligence having fun. Yes, I love. You, and it truly is. It's just fun. Creative creativity is just letting your imagination run wild and having fun with it. Whether it's painting or singing, or playing music or learning a new language, is all part of a creative design that allows you to have a richer life.

13:16 Completely agree. Now let's circle back to that create that critical thinking here, Jim. I can tell you that several of my clients have complained to me and we've tried to address what they really see is a horrible lack of critical thinking and the people that are coming into their organizations. And so I appreciated what you what you shared in the book about how to develop that, how you specified some activities around that. I do really see that as a missing in a lot of today's workforce. It is, and I candidly I relearned an approach to critical thinking from my Japanese licensee when I was at seven to eleven.

13:57 That story, I remember that till it. Yeah, they just had such a do a fabulous job of reinventing the idea of convenience, and they lit up the convenience business by constantly adapting to change. And I was well, I said the words I've talked to talk before, but I wasn't able to execute to the extent that they did. When I started digging into how do you do this? They gave me a simple solution that actually came from an American. It was Edward Deming that went to Japan after World War Two and he taught the Japanese business people how to use the scientific method. Of all things, I never thought about applying the scientific method to business, but it was very simplified into can into plan do se and what does that mean? It means first you plan. You come up with a hypothesis. I think, if we put this new product on the shelf that will sell X number of units. Then you do you actually take that action and then you and this is the important part, this is what we always forget. You step back and measure the results. So we've got the plan due part down but so many businesses forget to see oh yeah, yeah, yeah, of course it worked. But that measurement piece is critical in that critical thinking process because what the measurement piece then does is lets you truly change your original hypothesis based on facts. So if

15:32 you find out that your assumption was incorrect now that you have data, now that you have facts, then you're free to change your assumption in your hypothesis. Now if you apply that to what's going on today and you see this thing on the internet that says, oh, you know, here's the thing that we're going to pass off as the truth, and you say, hmm, well, the hypothesis is that's correct. But now I'm going to actually do something. I'm going to go to an action to find out the facts, and then once I get the data, I'm going to say, oh huh, that was incorrect. Now I can change my hypothesis. Rather than rather than repost that incorrect meme, I might say, I'm going to fire off a message to whoever sent that to me and say, by the way, here are the facts. It's incorrect. You may not want to embarrass yourself by continuing to send out memes that are incorrect. And that's the critical thinking that ironically help propel seven to eleven to greatness by allowing them to introduce items so many times. But it has a broader application in society. If we would just step back and have our own plan do see process.

16:50 Whenever we have information presented to us, or we've got our own hypothesis about the way the world is or the way our job is, we can apply the same the same methodology and it works well. And I think our future depends on that. So on that note, let's take our very first break. I'm your host, Doctor Release Cortes. We're on the air with Jim Keyes, a global business leader, philanthropist, educator, artist, musician, commercial rated pilot, and modern retisence man. He is the former CEO of seven to eleven and Blockbuster. We've been talking a bit about the first two parts of his book, which speak to what to learn and then how to learn. After the break, we're going to start peeling into why we learned.

17:31 Stay with us. Will be right back, Doctor Release. Court haz is a management consultant specializing in meaning and purpose. An inspirational speaker and author, she helps companies visioneer for greater purpose among stakeholders and develop purpose inspired leadership and meaning infused 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 elisecortes dot com. Let's talk about how to get your employees working on purpose.

18:20 This is working on Purpose with doctor Elise Cortes. To reach our program today or to open a conversation with Elise, send an email to a lease a LISEE at elisecortes dot com. Now back to working on purpose. Thanks for stating with us, and welcome back to working on a purpose. I'm your host, doctor Elise Cortes, as I am dedicated to helping create a world where people realize the potential at work and are led by inspirational leaders that help them find their greatness. I continue to research and write my own books, so my last one came out in March of twenty twenty three. It's called The Great Revitalization, How activating meaning and purpose can radically in liven your business and I wrote it to help leaders understand the changed lay of the land in terms of who the workforce is and what do they want and then I provide twenty two best practices about build into your culture to provide to provide that for them.

19:13 You can find my book at at leastcortest dot com or at almazont Amazon if you are just now joining us. My guest is Jim Keyes. He's the author of Education is Freedom The Future is in your hands, which is what we've been talking about today. So all right, so now and I want to spend some time on this, Jim. I think this is really interesting and the last thing that you were talking about is going to get us into the second one of the seeds that you talk about. But in terms of why we learned, just like in your first other two parts, you have three pieces to that. But first, the why we learned piece was really interesting for me, Jim, because when I think about, just you know what, why do we spend all these this time educating ourselves. I've been going to school most of my life. My poor mother was like, when you need to stop going to school? I'm like, I hope never, Mom, which would give really small series of many heart attacks of course, right, But putting forth, I think it's interesting that you have a whole section on why we learned. So let's just start with you know, why did you situate that section?

20:08 Then we'll get into the three parts. Well, I'll start I start with a broader definition of why to learn and why education and why the name education is freedom and supposed to education for a good job or something. And that came back to my dad, who didn't even graduate from I think he went as far as the sixth grade. He was a factory worker, but he had spent some time in World War Two on the Burma road. He was a truck driver and an army guy, and came back from that experience and he used to tell me stories about the Burmese people and the beautiful culture that he experienced, and how amazing it was to have been privileged. Even though it was World War Two. He wasn't excited about being in the war, but he had the privilege of traveling the world for the first time in his life. Small town in Massachusetts guy, and he experienced the Burmese culture and the people and the food, and he was fascinated by that and kept talking about someday, if you ever have the chance, you should travel the world because the amazing people you can meet and the things you can learn by getting out of this little area where everybody looks and sounds just like us, is just amazing. So to him, that was the why of education, not about getting a fancy job or making a lot of money. His why was freedom.

21:42 The more you learn, the more freedom you have to travel the world and mix with cultures and people that are different from you, and that was his definition of success. So from a very early age, I kind of filed that away, and that was a part of the inspiration for the book, being education is freedom. That was a I grew up with a very definite, different definition of what freedom was all about, and I was blessed with that. But then as I started writing the book, I got to the first two sections, and I was trying to simplify almost a mnemonic device. Let's put this advice in the form of three s's or six s's, so that it's memorable for people. And then I had given a draft of this manuscript to a friend and he said, Jim, it's great that you're doing this, but you never addressed the why. And he said, did you ever read Simon Sinek's book about why? You know? Just ask why? And then do you do you know the why of everything, of your being, of your business. And I reflected on that and I thought, garn it, you know he's right.

22:51 I haven't, and I started looking at the why, and I came up with I actually had these three c's already in my head, and they were part of the formula, but I was in the interest of simplifying, not adding too many steps in this. And then I said, wait a minute, now there are three of these c's that really very clearly explain why education is so important and why we have to learn. Yes, at forty thousand feet it's all about freedom, but why is it so important to learn how to be free? And I started with the idea of collaboration because in school, we tend to be individual performers. We all through grade school and high school.

23:41 We take tests, we study, but we're never asked to have to collaborate, except you might be in you know, your baseball team or something like that. And then we enter the workforce. And my first experience exposure to collaboration was in school, but it was in business school. We're in anticipating the workplace. They forced us into case studies and. It forced us into okay. And I say, forced us because I hated it the idea that my grade was going to be subject to some other knucklehead, you know, who maybe didn't have the same work ethic or studying or whatever. But it's a great story because I get into this first case study and it was an accounting class, and I was like, oh, dead accounting. This is a terrible It was a political science undergrad and here I am at Columbia Business Wan I have to take core accounting. And then I'm looking around and one of the guys in the case study was from Price Waterhouse Cooper's. He's an accountant. I'm going, oh, okay, made this collaboration things not so bad? He can actually help me. Then I started feeling guilty, as like, oh wait, these people all have accounting experience of some sort. He's the only CPA, but they all have some accounting. I'm the guy it doesn't have any acatty experience. And yet what I found is at the end of the case study, I contributed a completely you talk about out of the box, a completely creative solution to comparing balance sheets that as accountants,

25:17 their initial reaction was you can't do that, you know, well, but yeah, why not, and we ended up using this creative solution and we got an A in the class. So the non accountant actually contributed, and what it demonstrated was the power of collaboration. And so I've got another great example that I use going back to my childhood. I learned how to play an instrument early on in grammar school, a flutophone, and then I progressed to a trumpet, and I was terrible on the trumpet. But I then had the privilege of sitting in on a small youth orchestra, and I was amazed, just amazed at how good I sounded with the collaboration of other instruments and other students all playing together. Now, we were probably terrible because we were a youth orchestra, but we were a heck of a lot better than me alone on my trumpet, right, and as the power of collaboration. And I like to tell that story now because then I progressed and I ended up being chairman of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, and I had a lot of activity on the stage with the musicians, and I learned these musicians were all very different, very very different, and their instruments are very different. So think about You've got this beautiful violin right now. If

26:47 imagine these these instruments were people, the violins sitting there looking at the base gone fat, yeah yeah, right at the base is looking at the cello saying what do you you know? And then both look at the oboe and they say, you sound squeaky and what will you look really weird? And then the trumpets start and the brass starts and they're like, oh man, what's up with that you? We don't like that noise. But you bring them together and they create a beautiful symphonic harmony, right, and they all appreciate their collective the beauty of their collective sound. Now take that metaphor and apply it to humans.

27:38 And you put a group of humans in a room and one's tall and thin and one's not so thin, and one may be a different race, and one may be a different religion, and one may be a high voice and a low voice, and old and young and rich and poor, and throw them all in a room and ask them to solve a problem. Their initial reaction maybe to point to each other and go, look at this character. I don't want to work with them, just as I did when I entered my first case study. And yet the end result, if managed effectively, if they all can appreciate the power of collaboration and make a beautiful harmony and create a product better than any individual one of them, or two of them, or five of them could produce, I call that the second C cultural literacy.

28:34 Yes, before you go there really quick, I want to I want to dive into something. Jim, and you were reminding me of one of my big pet peeves and when I'm when I'm consulting with clients that I see companies do all the time is they shoot themselves in the foot when they're hiring people and they say, oh, we can't hire Jim. He doesn't have abc experience, their industry experience like us, right, And it is so backwards. There's no collaboration out there. You know. Look at that beautiful example of you at Columbia with the accountants, right, you could see something that they couldn't see because they had been schooled a certain way. And so, ladies and gentlemen, as you're listening and watching, I really encourage you to consider if hiring people from outside your industry as a form of collaboration just had to get that in before we get to the next sea. Actually, you know, we've got some time before we hit our next break. So the culture literacy for me, Jim, your second seat is really near and dear in my heart. I am somebody who is a tremendous beneficiary of travel. I lived abroad in Spain, in Bzil for three years and in my twenties went all over Western Europe, all over South America.

29:41 It was incredible mind blowing experience. And that because of that, Jim, I still speak Spanish and Portuguese. I'm married to Costa Rican, which is how I got the name Cortez, and that's where my company is named Gusto now, because Gusto means about the same thing in English, Spanish and Portuguese, which is zest and verb andenthusiasm. So I just really wanted to echo that bit about collaboration and then as beginning to culture literacy. So now I'm back to you, please cultural literacy please. Yeah. Well, I didn't have any background in cultural literacy because I grew up in a place where the only minorities were Irish or Italian. You know, we were very, very small town Ish, and I didn't have exposure to other people, Protestant or Catholic. It was about it right.

30:33 And then I had the privilege of during college, I earned a scholarship to go to London, to the University of London to study abroad. And I go over there first time ever outside of the country, first time on an airplane. I parachuted into it, not literally, but I parachued into a place in southeast London where I thought, boy, they're going to me. I'm an American. Everybody loves Americans. And I got over there and didn't like me at all. I didn't understand. I thought, how can you not like me? I mean, I'm American, I'm cool, right, And I was a Yank and they called me names, they called me the Yank, and they weren't including me and their friend circles and everything.

31:22 And it was pretty rough the first time. And the people who embraced me, which was really interesting, were my Indian and my Pakistani friends, who all of a sudden, now they were the minorities in London at the time. They were discriminated against to some extent, and one of those guys named Mushtock Malik ended up being one of my best friends. And I just left his house by the way in Monaco, where he has become a wildly successful real estate developer, and we've we had this very conversation that I learned in that experience culture literacy. He and my Indian friends. He was from Pakistan or his family was from Pakistan. They taught me a sense of confidence that allowed me to assimilate into the British circles.

32:25 But I needed to change. I needed to adapt, and I needed to respect their culture, not force mine on them. I needed to respect their culture and understand it and become truly literate in their ways of doing things. And then once I did that, then they were more interested in my culture. And what started out as an aversion to Americans became an interest in Americans. And now all of a sudden, I'm being brought to play, to join the cricket team and play rugby and do all these other things. And they ended up making me senior student, which was the sort of head resident of the house, the student housing we were living in by the second semester.

33:09 So I went from the outcast minority to the you know, popular kid on campus. So I've characterized this in the book in the context of all of this noise we have today out there in society about diversity and wokeness and dei and all that, and it's become such a polarizing, negative mess out there. But if you break down the real purpose of the concept of woke which by the way, didn't start with thelam It started in nineteen twenty seven in the black community, to have the black community tell others within the black community, you know what, just be aware there is a different culture that we have to assimilate too, and we have to understand. And they encouraged each other to adapt and to understand and and so all of these negatives that are swirling around now are completely unnecessary and they're they're politicization, politicization of of of a concept that is truly the right concept, which is understanding each other's culture so that we can become citizens of this world and we can come better at collaboration cultural literacy.

34:39 Oh beautiful, Jim, I want to see a little bit more about that. But let's take our last break here. I'm your host, doctor Reali's Cortez, who've been on the air with Jim Keys, who has had a lifetime commitment to education, serving as a foundation founding director of the Dallas Education Foundation and is the founder of Education and Freedom Foundation. We've been talking about now why to learn. So far, you've covered the collaboration and culture literacy. After the Rik, We're going to talk about character and also get into one of his other key topics are extra humanity, stay, what will be right back.

35:24 Doctor Elise Cortes is a management consultant specializing in meaning and purpose. An inspirational speaker and author, she helps companies visioneer for greater purpose among stakeholders and develop purpose inspired leadership and meaning infused 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 elisecortes dot com. Let's talk about how to get your employees working on purpose. This is working on Purpose with doctor Elise Cortes. To reach our program today or to open a conversation with Elise, send an email to a lease a l I se at eliscortes dot com.

36:08 Now back to working on purpose. Interesting with us and welcome back to working on Purpose. I'm your host doctor at least Cortes. I mentioned in the first break about my last book coming out in March of twenty twenty three, the Great Vialization. What I did for you is I created a three page assessment that you can download from my website gustodeshnow dot com, and it will help you understand the extent to which you are. You have a culture today that meets today's discerning standards. It's at gustodeshnow dot com if you are just joining us. My guest is Jim Keyes. You s the author of education is freedom. The future is in your hands. So just what we be talking about today. So before we go on to the last one character, one of the things I just wanted to really echo and emphasize about the cultural literacy for me, Jim, was you know, as you know, when I read your book, I've notated certain things that really lined for me, and I want to read what you said here. You said, if you surround yourself with only those who look, act and think like you, then you will become a reflection of that narrow subset. If instead, you seek to surround yourself with those of other cultures and backgrounds, then you too will develop the breadth of experience that reflects the cumulative strengths of each other. All of that represents the cultural currency that can grow over time as you gain exposure to new and different cultures.

37:27 So to me, what that. Really speaks to is that when you align yourself with people from different cultures, you literally what you're doing is you're enlarging yourself. Exactly exactly you're learning, You're learning from them. And I love that. I don't I don't know whoever said this or where I learned it, but I love the idea that I can take a little bit of everyone that I meet with throughout my life. I can take a little bit of them with me, Yes, And that creates inside of me a patchwork quilt, And the more different they are from me, the more colorful and rich that patchwork quilte will become. Yes. Yes, Well, like you, I grew up in a very homodiously white town and was northeastern Oregon. We were largely white, Hispanics had some representation, they were very much the minority. I couldn't get out of there fast enough.

38:20 For some reason, I inherently had an interest in difference in other people, and like you, when when I went to London, I also found the Indian community, and they were very warm and embracing to me too, who probably might have been about the same time. But yes, so I just really wanted to echo this notion of how being around other cultures is enlarging. So many people are afraid to talk with or approach people that look different than them, and I just want to encourage that curiosity. And again back on why education, why are we going about this. The world desperately needs to be united, not fragmented. It's true, and to your point, the world is a shrinking place with technology and with the ability of transportation making it possible for people to be everywhere in the world.

39:12 Have a great sort of subset to that story about learning from Indians and Pakistanis in London. Little would I realize dial forward twenty years later. This was the conversation with my friend mushdak Malik a couple of weeks ago in Monaco. Little did I realize that twenty or thirty years later, less than twenty years later, I would be CEO of seven to eleven and my largest franchise community would be comprised of Indians and Pakistanis, and my ability to learn from my friends their culture and understand it, not be intimidated by it, not be misled by per perceptions of it. But to embrace that culture was a huge career boost for me.

40:06 Absolutely, absolutely, And I love the story you told about. I forget what was the surrounding it, But when your franchise franchises were getting rocks thrown through their windows and you're like, what's going on here? Why are they targeting these people? This is not right. I understand them to be. About right, right, right, But I had that a perspective that was very different than I would have had had I not had that experience, and I was I'll be forever grateful. I literally was thanking my friend for unwittingly, you know, helping me be a better business person because he gave me this help to stimulate this culture literacy that ended up being an important element in my career.

40:50 And I can't emphasize how much more important it is today for everyone everyone listening, if you have children or if you're young yourself. In thirty years, this world is going to be such a smaller place, and the need to be able to interact with cultures from all over the planet will be critically important. Yes, I agreed, and it's so beautiful. Okay, So there's two more things I want to cover before I let you go this time, and one of them is the three C for why I learn, which is character. Yeah. I included that as the last and possibly the most powerful. See because we can learn from books, and we can learn any topic at all from the internet, from books, from classrooms. But the hardest thing to learn is that our character ends up being our brand. So if you may have seen me take a sip of a soft drink and my friends from PEPSI will be an upset if I use this example. But I'm going to use Coca Cola as example. This is a brand, and when I am looking for a cola beverage, I will turn to either Coke or Pepsi because I know what's inside, and that brand has a look on the outside, it has packaging, it has appearance, and then I know what's inside. I have the confidence and trust in that product. Now,

42:26 people forget that each of us has a brand and it's a combination of what we look like on the outside. So yes, appearance is important, and more important than the external appearance is who we are on the inside. So just like that, can of Coca Cola when I pick it up, I have the confidence, the trust in that product. So our integrity, our gratitude, our compassion, our humility, all of those elements that make us who we are are our brand. And you know, let's face it, people have choices with who they work with, who they associate with, who they want to invest in, And all of these choices come down to what do people see and feel when they interact with you. It's your character so critically important.

43:27 M Yeah, and if they also decided if they want to follow you or not too exactly right, all right, so we've done it. If we've now then now covered the why we're learning here? That was and that was exactly what I wanted you and I wanted to get in there and chew on that. That part of your book is we didn't get to it last time. The last thing that I want to cover, which I thought was a really really fresh idea, is your notion of what's RX for humanity. Yeah. I, as I wrote the book, I intended it originally for young people. Let's let me let me help other students find the path to success that I was fortunate to find. And I'm gonna I'm going to wrap it in what to learn, how to learn, and why to learn? And then as I began to work on the book and research things like, well, what are the obstacles, what are the obstacles to collaboration, what are the obstacles to critical thinking? And what are the obstacles to people embracing change? I came with a up to with a constant theme that I discovered and it's the same thing I discovered in the business world. It's the same thing I discovered in the academic world, and that is fear that what is it that causes I'm going to take you all the way back to grade school. Remember in grade school when I was that kid that said I know, I know, and I was ridiculed for it. You probably were too, And that's had nothing to do with me me.

45:01 It had everything to do with them that they were afraid that I was going to show them up, that they were going to get left behind, that the teacher was going to like me better than them. It was fear right, and so dial that forward. And then I entered the workforce and I discovered, wait a minute, it's the same thing. It's first I discovered it in a blue collar world in a factory where I was working too hard and people were criticizing me to the point of wanting to fight with me over. You were a rapebuster. Yes, I know, I remember that story. Yeah, yeah, it's terrible. And what what was that? It was fear. They didn't want to lose their job, they didn't want to look bad. And then dial it to the white collar world, same thing. And then I and then I realized, you know what, this isn't just academic fear.

45:49 It's not just corporate fear. Although in corporations it's a killer of careers and it's a killer of corporations. It is they stop innovating. Why because the they just get stuck. But then I looked at society and I said, oh my gosh, this is the same thing that's tearing us apart. It's creating the polarization. And I see people all the time that are going against their values, completely against their values, supporting issues causes leaders whatever you want, and fighting to the death over it when it makes no sense because it's so inconsistent with who they are and what their values are. But then you look inside of it and you go, ah, it is almost tribal behavior caused by fear.

46:39 Someone's convinced them someone's going to take something from you, do something to you, get something that you're not going to get, and it creates this tendency to then tribal, be tribal, and be with those people that think like you, even if their values don't match, but you're convinced that they are right, that those other people are the enemy. And it's totally fear based. So in the course of identifying this fear based issue, I thought, well, what I'm I gonna do about this. I've got to come up with a solution. How do I come up with a solution?

47:19 So I researched, I employed my critical thinking. I have a hypothesis that this fear is irrational and can be solved. How do you solve it? And then let me put that process in place, collect data, and then go back and adjust my hypothesis. So here's what I came up with. I went back to the ancient philosopher's Aristotle, Socrates, a guy named Rusht, an Andalusian philosopher who was also quoted in Star Wars, not an exact quote, but pretty much by Yoda. And the quote was that ignorance leads to anger, and well, ignorance leads to fear. Ignorance is what causes fear.

48:24 And this is so true. If you're a kid and you're afraid of the dark, you turn on the light. Well, that's not about one minute left him, so I want to make sure you get through the whole thing. So ignorance leads to fear, and fear leads to anger. Anger leads to violence. Right, anger leads to hate. Hate leads to violence. So what's the antidote to that? Well, that's what Yoda said to young Luke, that that knowledge is the antidote to ignorance, and knowledge can lead to understanding. Understanding leads to hope. Hope leads to peace. And if you can take this negative cycle of fear and replace it with knowledge, and by the way, I'll add a little faith, because that's what Yoda was saying with the force, right, doesn't matter what religion, if you have faith. So the combination of knowledge and faith can reverse this cycle of fear that society is in today and reverse it by using knowledge and faith to have hope and hope leads to understanding and peace, And what a better world to live?

49:26 In so that's literally why I said that the book Education is Freedom. I said, the future is in your hands because it's up to each and every one of us individually to counter to conquer fear through knowledge and to replace that cycle of fear with a cycle of hope. And that I believe makes this book a self help guide for humanity if people will look at it in that fashion. Which is why I wanted to have you back on Jim. Thank you so much for coming back. You are a gift and so glad to know. I know you listeners and viewers, you are going to want to learn more about this man and his life and what he's created. You can find him at a couple sites. Education is freedombook dot com or his personal site, James W. Keys dot com. We'll catch you next week for another titillating version of Working on Purpose. This is something that is my pride and passion. I bring it to you with conviction and I hope you'll see I'll see you next week.

50:22 Thanks again, Jim, thank you. We hope you've enjoyed this week's program. Be sure to tune into Working on Purpose featuring your host, doctor Elise Cortes, 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. Let's work on purpose.